Cambridge Language Surveys: Chinese - by Jerry Norman

In the Ming and Qing dynasties there developed a very strong conservative attitude toward the writing system which was opposed to virtually any innovation, especially to acceptance of simplified Chinese.
From the Tang dynasty on, a large number of popular simplified characters were created and used widely among the common people for writing such things as account books, pawn tickets, medicinal prescriptions, operatic scripts and certain forms of vernacular literature.
Even members of the literati employed these non-official but convenient forms in personal correspondence and for copying materials for private use.
Such characters were strictly banned for any public or official use.
As part of the general reform movement of the early 1900s, the goverment felt the Chinese script should be simplified.
The most practical way was to accept the many simplified characters already current.
They issued of a list of 515 simplified characters in 1956, containing many simplified forms which had been in unofficial use for many centuries, and at the same time a number of newly created abbreviated forms were introduced.
In 1964 they simplified more than 2000 characters, many from the simplification of common radicals and phonetic components.
Many modern simplified graphs were created by regularizing cursive forms.

Government proclaimed henceforth Chinese should be written horizontally from left to right.

Classical Chinese is the written form of Old Chinese.
The major prose works of this period: Qiān’s Shǐjì.
Works dating from before the fifth century BC are written in Preclassical Chinese.
This language differed considerably from that of the classical age and rarely served as model to later writers.
Classical Chinese was almost certainly based on the vernacular language of the period.
In the Postclassical period, writers continued to model their prose on this early literary language.
The written languages thus began to take on an archaic aspect as the spoken language underwent a very different and large independent development.
Thus Classical Chinese came to play a role in China analogous to that played by Latin in Western Europe.

Postclassical literary Chinese, sometimes viewed as a timeless imitation of earlier models, often betrays its age by means of such vernacular intrusions.

Old Chinese morphemes are almost entirely monosyllabic; moreover, most words are also monomorphemic.
As more and more terms were required to meet the needs of an expanding civilization, compounding was virtually the only way to create needed new words.

A language rarely increases the overall number of its morphemes except by borrowing.
Chinese resists borrowing.

Classical Chinese has extraordinary freedom that almost any word functions; nouns can function like verbs; verbs and adjectives like nouns.
Most words may function as other parts of speech depending on their place in the sentence.

When wŏ is used as a subject, it seems to have a contrastive sense: ‘I (but no one else)’, ‘we (but not you or others)’.

Classical Chinese avoids the use of personal pronouns.
Second-person pronoun was viewed as intimate, used among equals or to inferiors. A person of higher status has honorific substitutes:
Similarly, when addressing superiors.
zǐ ‘master’ and jūn ‘lord’. Deferential forms for first-person pronouns: chén servant.

The Classical literary element in the modern written language is so important that it is hard to imagine anyone mastering the modern language without some acquaintance with the Classical language.