ABSTRACT
The oldest phase of the Chinese language - and beyond which we will probably be unable to probe - is the language of oracle inscriptions, discovered at the Yinxu site, the ancient capital of the Shang-Yin dynasty. Before presenting the oldest phase of the Chinese language, this phase began eight hundred years before the phase that Karlgren has termed "Archaic." The situation of a Sinologist is unimaginable to a linguist studying European languages. Even remarking that Chinese has both prepositional and postpositional determination is far more important than creating new terms to label the two. The chapter explains the oldest phase of the Chinese language, namely the language of oracle bone inscriptions. The remarks on Pre-Archaic Chinese are based on the book of Chen Mengjia, who gave the fundamental features of the syntax of the late Shang–Yin time. Pre-Archaic Chinese is the only phase of the Chinese language that is known from authentic documents preserved in their original form.
