 Historical linguists have found that phrases consisting of nouns and numbers went through several structural changes in Old Chinese and Middle Chinese before classifiers appeared in them . The earliest forms may have been Number – Noun , like English ( i.e. " five horses " ) , and the less common Noun – Number ( " horses five " ) , both of which are attested in the oracle bone scripts of Pre @-@ Archaic Chinese ( circa 1400 BCE to 1000 BCE ) . The first constructions resembling classifier constructions were Noun – Number – Noun constructions , which were also extant in Pre @-@ Archaic Chinese but less common than Number – Noun . In these constructions , sometimes the first and second nouns were identical ( N1 – Number – N1 , as in " horses five horses " ) and other times the second noun was different , but semantically related ( N1 – Number – N2 ) . According to some historical linguists , the N2 in these constructions can be considered an early form of count @-@ classifier and has even been called an " echo classifier " ; this speculation is not universally agreed on , though . Although true count @-@ classifiers had not appeared yet , mass @-@ classifiers were common in this time , with constructions such as " wine – six – yǒu " ( the word <unk> yǒu represented a wine container ) meaning " six yǒu of wine " . Examples such as this suggest that mass @-@ classifiers predate count @-@ classifiers by several centuries , although they did not appear in the same word order as they do today . 
