破解“之乎者也”千古之迷——文言语气词非口语说

Origin of Chinese Written Modal Particles: A Solution to the Historical Mystery

文言体是我国古代书面语的主要形式,在二三千年的历史长河中,承载着古代文明的发展成果,对传统文化的积累作出了不可磨灭的贡献。按照传统观念与语言学基本理论,文言体既是使用或模仿秦汉词汇和语法而写成的,作为其明显标志的"之乎者也"一类文言语气词,理应是古代口语词汇。但经过对历代有关论述的推理分析,可以得出一个出人意料的结论:"之乎者也"并非古代口语词汇,而是人为创造的一种书面语符号,兼具断句和提示语气的功能;当唐宋之后的口语中出现了白话语气词之后,它才逐渐作为现代意义上的语气词使用于书面语。

Over the past several thousand years, the ancient Chinese written language has developed into a distinct linguistic style, and constituted an indispensible means to pass down the fruit of Chinese civilization, thus making an indelible contribution to the development of Chinese culture. According to the Chinese traditional concepts in linguistics, the ancient Chinese written language followed the lexi-co-grammatical conventions of the Qin and Han dynasties; the various modal particles of written Chi-nese such as： zhi （之）, hu （乎）, zhe （者） and ye （也） , are thought to be the written transcriptions of corresponding spoken modal particles. However, through examining the relevant discussions datingback to the Spring and Period, we argue that the modal particles of written Chinese are not transcriptions of their spoken counterparts; on the contrary, they are originally created to play function of punctuation and mood-marking. Not until the spoken modal particles showed up in Tang and Song dynasties, did these written markers begin to be used as the modal particle words in the the the the modem sense.