 Although the grammar of written classical Chinese differs from the language spoken then or now, and it is neither systematic nor complete, one shouldn’t think it was consciously put together by some particularly clever language-oriented members of the Chinese intelligentsia at a particular place and time long ago, as Jacob Gohl did (Duyvendak 1936: 6). Rather is it almost surely a development of the oracle bone inscriptions of the Shang Dynasty (Keightley 1978). Thus the written and spoken languages evolved differently over centuries.