Why Mandarin Chinese sounds so different from Middle Chinese

[hansioux]

By the way, I wrote about some of the things talked about here back in December.

Chinese is such an archaic language, it will be very difficult

Ok, I feel like I need to rehash some of the things I’ve mentioned on forumosa before. When the Manchu sacked Beijing in 1644, people of Beijing spoke the Mandarin (官話) of the time, the Chinese Koine, which was based on the Nanjing accent, since Ming was founded by a group of people from the south, and the first capital of Ming was Nanjing. The Nanjing accent, which is a part of the Wu branch, retained many features of Middle Chinese. The Chinese Koine at the time still retained most checke…