How did people communicate in ancient China when there was no Mandarin?

The earliest version of Mandarin was called "ya yin," and with a name like that, you'd know that it must have been invented by the aristocrats, who had nothing better to do than drink and talk every day.

It is said that as early as the pre-Qin period, the nobles of all the vassal states from Qi in Shandong to Qin in the northwest had to learn this special language of communication between the nobles, "Ya Yin".

With the unification of the Middle Kingdom by the Qin Dynasty and the introduction of the small seal script as the standard font, Chinese culture was stabilized in terms of the transmission of the written word, even though different dialects were spoken in different parts of the country, and the same characters were written.

What dialects were the Ya-yin, the "common language" of the time, based on, and what exactly was the Ya-yin sound?

According to "Rhetoric - YaYin", the earliest YaYin belongs to the upper ancient sound system, now there is no complete dialect to correspond to, so, what our ancestors first said, who do not know ......?

Data records, since the five hu chaotic China, the clothes of the southern ferry, the original Central Plains YaYin south, China's official language is gradually divided into the north and south of the two branches. The Ming Dynasty, the destruction of Yuan, the capital of Nanjing, "one to the Central Plains YaYin for the right", so the Nanjing language became the standard voice. According to evidence, the Ming Dynasty and the Qing Dynasty before the middle of China's official standard language to Nanjing official language as the mainstream. That is to say, we usually watch the ancient costume drama, the ministers in a serious voice shouted "my emperor long live ten thousand years" when they said: Nanjing dialect!

Since the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, Beijing has become the political, economic and cultural center of the country. More and more people from all over the world went to Beijing to take exams, become officials, and do business, and over time, they also learned this Nanjing accent "Mandarin", but at that time it could only be used in the officialdom, so the Mandarin at that time was also known as "official language", and it still has not been widely promoted.

The modern version of Mandarin was proposed by Zhu Wenxiong, an activist in the Cheyenne Character Movement at the end of the Qing Dynasty. He wrote a book called "Jiangsu New Alphabet" in 1926, which divided the Chinese language into three categories, one of which was Mandarin, and noted that it was "the common language of all provinces.

Later, as more and more people spoke the official language, it became less appropriate to refer to it as the "official language," and the Mandarin language was given a new name: Guoyu (国语). However, the name "national language" was very controversial at that time, and many people, including Qu Qiubai, opposed it. After the liberation of China, the government was very concerned about the reform of Chinese characters, and not only did it give "Putonghua" a strict connotation and standardization, but also made the promotion of Putonghua one of the tasks of script reform.

The ancient way of communication has come a long way from Yayin to Guanhua and finally to Putonghua. However, in modern communication, the ancient way of communication is still followed in a large number of cases.

Modern Chinese defines the phonetics of Putonghua as "the Beijing dialect as the basic sound, and the northern dialect as the basic dialect", of which Luanping County in Chengde City is the place where the standardized phonetics of Putonghua is collected nationwide.

Anecdotally, there has been a rumor that Cantonese lost out to Mandarin as the national language in the early Republic of China by only one vote. In addition, the writer Wang Meng also put forward two other claims, which have been circulating in Luoyang and Shaanxi, respectively: Luoyang dialect and Shaanxi dialect were only one vote short of becoming the common language of the country.

Regardless of whether it is true or false, dialects have played an important role in cultural transmission at different times, and today, Chinese dialects can be divided into eight categories: Mandarin, Wu, Hakka, Cantonese, Min, Gan, Xiang, and Jin.

Based on the characteristics and development history of the dialect, the most widely influenced should be the official dialect, the official dialect of the population accounted for 73% of the total population of the Han Chinese people, such as we usually in the film and television productions of the most contact with the Northeast China, Shaanxi Province, Henan Province, Shandong Province, ...... are all belonging to the official dialect according to the geographic division of different branches, such as the above mentioned, the Northeastern China, Henan Province, Shandong Province and the Chinese language, and so on. Different branches, such as the above mentioned Northeastern dialect belongs to the Northeastern official dialect area, including Hei, Ji, Liao most of the region and the eastern part of Inner Mongolia, the northeastern part of Hebei Province, these different branches can be divided into Jishen piece, Hafu piece, Heisong piece, and each can be divided into a number of small pieces of ...... However, although the official dialect is divided into a detailed and there are a lot of branches, people understand the dialect of different regions, and they are not aware of it. People understand the different regions of the dialect is not bitterly difficult, basically all the phonological changes.

While Wu dialect, Hakka dialect, Cantonese dialect, Min dialect, Gan dialect, Xiang dialect, and Jin dialect are a little bit like "different languages" for people in other regions, these dialects are all based on the ancient Chinese language and the middle-ancient Chinese language, which have retained a lot of ancient tones compared with the modern Chinese language, more like the ancient Qin Dynasty. The Chinese dialect is based on the ancient Chinese language and the Middle Chinese language, which retains a lot of ancient tones compared to the modern Chinese language, and is more like the elegant tones of the pre-Qin Dynasty, for example, Confucius used Cantonese to speak the Analects of Confucius, and Yingzheng spoke Minnan language to ascend the throne!