Original sentence: Regardless of when they underwent development, Lianqing Wang claims that they did not become grammatically mandatory until sometime around the 11th century
Edited sentence: Classifiers did not gain official recognition as a lexical category (part of speech) until the 20th century.From then until the 1940s, linguists such as Ma, Wang Li, and Li Jinxi treated classifiers just a type of noun that "expresses a quantity".He made this separation based on the fact that classifiers were semantically bleached, and that they can be used directly with a number, whereas true nouns need to have a measure word added before they can be used with a number.Lü Shuxiang first treated them as a separate category in the 1940s, calling them "unit words" ( dānwèicí) in his 1940s Outline of Chinese grammar () and finally "measure words" ( liàngcí) in Grammar studies ().Regardless of when they underwent development, Wang Lianqing claims that they did not become grammatically mandatory until sometime around the 11th century.The earliest modern text to discuss classifiers and their use was Ma Jianzhong's 1898 Ma's basic principles for writing clearly ()