ABSTRACT
Among all areas of the liberal arts, linguistics is rightly believed to be an exact science. It does not, however, mean that it is an exact science in the same sense as mathematics, physics, or chemistry. These are formulating laws, which are universal and exceptionless. The chapter presents many general statements used to characterize the presented languages and problems. It focuses on a presentation of the entire history of the Chinese language as well as the present state of many Sinitic languages, it cannot be complete in the sense that it presents some problems better than others. In Mod-ern Chinese monosyllabic morphemes united by syntactic links serve to create new words as well as derived forms. Thus, it may be said that in Archaic Chinese phonemes were the basic units serving to create words, that is, were basic units of morphology and word formation, while in Modern Chinese this role is mainly played by syllables.
