[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.