ABSTRACT
In a study of the historical development of Modern Chinese, Tsu-lin Mei (1997: 82) compared Proto-Chinese and Modern Chinese in terms of the following attributes: 1 morphemes being monosyllabic, 2 possession of tones, 3 absence of consonant clusters, 4 lack of morphological inflection, 5 need for classifiers, 6 modifier prior to the head, and 7 SVO word order. The results are given in Table 7.1.
