Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/100

 is to say, a book containing a selection of the ideographs in commonest daily use; and they brought also the "Analects of Confucius," which soon became, and has ever since remained, the gospel of Japanese ethics. There is no reasonable doubt that the existence of an ideographic script was known to the Japanese long before the fourth century. That conclusion is easily reached. For whatever may be said about the legend that the diagrams of Fuh (3200 ) or the tortoise-shell mottling of Tsang (2700 ) was the embryo of the ideograph, unquestionably the Chinese developed that form of writing as far back as the eighteenth century before Christ; and since they virtually began to overrun Korea six hundred years subsequently, and intercourse existed between Korea and Japan from a date certainly not later than a thousand years after the latter event, it is plain that both Korea and Japan must have known about the ideograph long before "The Thousand Characters" and the "Analects of Confucius" reached the Court at Yamato. But to know about the ideograph and to use it are two very different things. An alphabet, or even a syllabary, being a purely phonetic vehicle, lends itself to the transcription of any language. But ideographs, having their own inflexible sounds and their own fixed significances, cannot readily serve to transcribe the words of a foreign language which have different sounds and different significances. Suppose that