ABSTRACT
The Chinese languages made the important step to syllabic morphology of the agglutinative type. The greatest works of Chinese poetry as well as the immense official literature — that is the historical, philosophical, and encyclopaedic works of this time — were written in this language, which may be the object of serious linguistic studies. It must be remembered that the language was not the predecessor of Modern Standard Chinese or of modern dialects. The introduction of Modern Standard Chinese as a standard language of China as whole began in 1919. The government has at its disposition means – such as the mass media and public schools – that are incomparable with those of the 7th century AD. The grammar of Classical Chinese was essentially identical with the AC grammar, but it had some characteristic simplifications, like the resignation of the prepositional use of a pronoun object before the negated verb.
