Zompist Bboard Again

Especially regarding grammar? I realized with the in-world origin of cat youkai in my story, their language would not just borrow from Middle Chinese like Japanese did, but probably derive from it or a feline "relative" of Middle Chinese. I'm not going back further into this rabbit hole for this project, but it would help me figure out quirks in their grammar if I know where they're starting from.

I'd even appreciate Mandarin- or Cantonese-learning materials that reference where things derived from in MC, with a preference for Mandarin.

My go-to reference is Axel Schuessler's Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese, which despite the title gives Middle Chinese (Táng) forms. It doesn't have much on syntax though.

My understanding, though, is that the vernacular (báihuà) was pretty well formed by Táng and Sòng times. Poetry continued to be written in wényán, but the operas and the Míng novels were written in báihuà. Most of the distinctive lexical and syntactic features of Mandarin (e.g. measure words, new pronouns, the copula shì) were pretty well developed by Táng times. Jerry Norman's Chinese contains a chapter on this period.

There are some books on Classical Chinese, so maybe those would help, too. The ones I know of are An Introduction to Literary Chinese by Michael A. Fuller and Classical Chinese: A Basic Reader by Naiying Yuan, Haitao Tang, and James Gleiss. There's also Introduction to Literary Chinese by R. Eno and Language of the Dragon: A Classical Chinese Reader by Gregory Chiang, but those probably aren't going to be as helpful.

For classical, there's also Pulleyblank's Outline of Classical Chinese Grammar, which is maybe easier to consult than a textbook.

The Eno has the advantage of being available free online, here.

I'd be curious, though, what resources there are for actual Middle Chinese.

Thank you all for the suggestions. I was able to find most of them as PDFs easily enough.I'll look them over soon.

None of the books above except for Naiying Yuan et al.'s textbooks might help you regarding Middle Chinese grammar. And even Yuan et al.'s textbooks are concerned with Middle Chinese only incidentally as part of the text readings (the textbooks also have a lot of straight Classical Chinese).

There is quite a bit of research into Middle Chinese grammar in English and especially in Mandarin. I'm not interested in the topic so I can't tell you what the oft-referred-to, must-read publications are, but you could begin with the likes of Chaofen SUN's Word-Order and Grammaticalization in the History of Chinese (a collection of essays on the history of Mandarin 把 ba, 了 le, the 的/得/地 de particle and the location of PPs in a VP through Middle Chinese) and work your way down the rabbit hole from there.

I should note that although the weight of written vernacular Chinese begins in the Ming dynasty (in the form of a stylized Lower Yangtze dialect), previous outstandingly vernacular texts exist, notably the mid-10th century Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall (or Zutangji, which seems to be often referred to in discussions of Middle Chinese grammar), not to mention glosses containing rewordings of difficult passages in old books (I once came across a detailed discussion of 2nd century scholar-official Zhao Qi's glosses of sentences in the Mencius, as he apparently used something that must have been close to how he spoke).

Thanks, I'll look into these soon