wenyann.

1936 N. Wales in E. Snow Living China 336 Until 1917 there existed in..stalemate three fairly distinct strata of literature: (1) the ancient cult of the literati in the dead wen-yen classical written language,..(2) the healthy parvenu pai-hua, ‘plain speech’, literature of the people in the spoken language, and..(3) the story-tellers' literature in the provincial dialects.

1964 Anthropol. Linguistics Mar. 31 Many words which require two characters in Han Chinese can be written with one character in Wenyen.

1968 P. Kratochvíl Chinese Lang. Today v. 163 Perhaps the most influential factor..was the outburst of writing in the new style which followed the rejection of wényán. This style called the new báihuà, or only báihuà (usually translated as ‘vernacular’; the etymology of the Chinese term which means something like ‘plain language’ is not quite certain), grew partly out of the tradition of popular old báihuà writing mainly represented by the great medieval novels.

1969 Language 45 690 One is the Classical Chinese, wényán, which has been used from antiquity up to recent years.

1980 Times Lit. Suppl. 27 June 725/1 He has been engaged..in an immense study of the ancient Chinese classics written in the elegant but archaic wenyen Chinese favoured by old-fashioned scholars—a language almost as remote from present-day speech as Latin from the modern European vernaculars.