-rockon Under Zhou dynasty, they established Mandarin as the main language. Of course only the elites and the scholar's knew the language right on top of their heads. The peasants couldn't afford to learn these languages, so they often spoke in their own language and soon learned Mandarin as well. So Mandarin has always been the main language and has been used in Beijing.
So if mandarin was the main language back then which word characters did they used? was it the traditional?
it was all traditional....simplify character writing didn't really pop up until about 15-20 years ago as people got more and more lazy
Some characters from the simplified system does have a longer history than their traditional counterpart... but proportion-wise Traditional characters have a longer historical lineage, most Simplified characters did not come into existence until the last few decades as endo has said... WTF?
100 years ago Mandarin was the official language. Today the ppl argued about China's official language. Many ppl want that Cantonese shall be the official language because Cantonese preserved the most of original Chinese language. Mandarin was fluenced by many changes especially by the Mandschu when the established the Qing Dynasty.
Did you not watch Louis Koo series where he went back in time? What was the name fo that series??? errr ... They spoke Cantonese, didn't they??? hehe ...
Gads, I can't believe people are still dragging up these threads from 3 years ago... At any rate, the "official" language of the court in 1907 was Manchu , , as the Qing dynasty 清朝 1644-1912, rulers of China were Manchurian. The 2001 TVB series that depicted the fictional time slip to the era witnessing the ascension of Qin Shi Huang Di, which established the Qin dynasty 秦朝 221-206 BC, was entitled A Step Into The Past. The Chinese outside the forbidden city spoke a polyglot of regional dialects, that were even further divided into sub-dialects. Mandarin 北方話 is a class of dialects that is regional to the northern and southwest parts of China, with specifically the Beijing sub-dialect being considered standard Mandarin. Modern Mandarin that is taught in schools today, uses standard Mandarin.
