This English version was translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The Chinese text is authoritative.
As everyone knows, Classical Chinese (文言文) was the written language of ancient China, 白话 (báihuà) is everyday spoken language, and vernacular writing (白话文) is the later written form of everyday speech. Pondering the meaning of these two names reveals something profound, and confirms from one angle that Classical Chinese, as a written language, belongs to a different category from 白话, everyday speech.
白话 is pronounced “báihuà ”, but in some places in the north it is pronounced “bái huó”, as in “你别瞎白话了” (“stop your idle prattle”), meaning “stop talking nonsense; don’t say meaningless or incorrect things.” Comparing 文言 and 白话, these terms express more than the commonly accepted distinction between written and spoken language: there is a further layer of meaning, namely that 文言 refers to meaningful words that reason things out, while 白话 is idle chatter, meaningless talk.
In ancient times 文 (wén) was the same as 纹 (wén, “pattern, grain”), representing the inner principles of things. 文言, then, means words that reason things out and carry meaning. Correspondingly, 白话 is the meaningless talk of casual chatter. Therefore words that may be written down and left to later generations must have reason and make sense; idle gossip must not be recorded.
The ancients believed that writing communicated with the divine, so the use of writing was treated with great care, and ordinary speech was not committed to writing. Written texts that were no longer needed were to be burned, respectfully returned to the gods of heaven with thanks. Hence, from ancient times until the Qing dynasty, the written language and everyday speech always ran on two parallel tracks. This is presumably also why 文言 and 白话 were used to denote the written and the spoken language respectively.
