[bloppe]

I don't speak either, but would posit that the status of Chinese as an East Asian Lingua Franca caused it to trend toward simplicity, whereas Japanese insularity (physical, cultural, and political, especially during the Edo period) provided far less incentive to simplify.

I'm sure that's an over-simplified explanation.

[hnfong]

I don't think there's any trend of written Chinese toward simplicity. Broadly speaking it has evolved towards "complexity" over its history.

If you looked up the texts in the most ancient Chinese (oracle bones, bronze inscriptions, etc.) they were basically characters stringed into very terse sentences with minimal grammar. IIRC typical "sentences" were like ~5-7 characters at most. They typically looked something like: "King Attack Barbarian. Good Luck? Win."

Then the classical texts (which had a status similar to Latin in East Asia) had sentences that were considerably more fully formed, but often still terse. Case in point: yesterday I was trying to understand a story about a man meditating in Zhuangzi, where it describes the sitting position as "隱几而坐" (the characters mean "hide", "chair/desk", "and", "sit"). So, was the person putting away the chair, then sitting (on the floor)? Or hiding behind the chair? Or possibly even hiding the chair with his clothes by sitting on it? Or was there a typographical error and another character was intended? I don't think anyone has a conclusive answer.

Modern Chinese (Mandarin) generally does not have these vague sentence structures and is much more fully fleshed out than classical Chinese. The same idea expressed in Mandarin would typically be 2-3 times longer than it would be in classical Chinese.

The Chinese language has evolved from extreme simplicity in ancient times to I guess moderate complexity today. Generally there was no simplification.

[marton78]

What you're describing is written Chinese though. It's entirely possible, that prepositions / postpositions were used in spoken language.

[hnfong]

Yes, but AFAICT there are no reliable records of what people actually said in spoken Chinese in those ancient/classical eras. And thus it's quite meaningless to speculate about the evolution of the spoken Chinese languages* over that time scale...

* note the plural -- while the written Chinese language was indeed the Lingua Franca of East Asia, the spoken language has regional differences culminating in the various regional Chinese spoken dialects/languages which are quite mutually unintelligible.

[bloppe]

I wouldn't call it meaningless. Comparative linguistics can draw surprisingly strong conclusions about how languages sounded a long time ago, even ones that were never written down. There are hundreds of Chinese languages/dialects apparently descended from a common ancestor. That's enough for some serious comparative historical analysis.

Anyway, expressiveness is not the same as complexity. It would seem Chinese was able to evolve a lot of expressiveness without adding too much unnecessary complexity, unlike more insular languages. The simplicity is also not exactly a firm rule, but a trend.

Thanks for the interesting examples. Would love to learn more Chinese.