Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/101

 it were required to write English by means of Greek monosyllables. Such a word as "garrison," for instance, might be composed phonetically by putting together γάρ ἴς and ὅν, but if these monosyllables necessarily conveyed the meaning of "for," "strength," and "his" respectively, it would be perplexing to have to attach to their combination the meaning of "a body of troops for the defence of a fortress." That is a comparatively easy example of the task that confronted the Japanese when they attempted to adapt the ideographs of China to the uses of their own language. In fact, they did not think of making the attempt until the ideograph had been known to them as a kind of distant acquaintance for many generations, and even when the "Analects" reached them, their ambition was limited at first to deciphering the strange script. History has not thought it worth while to record how or by whose genius the ideographs were first employed as a kind of syllabary for the purpose of writing Japanese. That is what had virtually happened, however, before the fifth century. And very soon something else happened also, namely, a radical modification of the Japanese language. For the more familiar the knowledge that students obtained of the ideograph, the less could they reconcile themselves to use it in a purely phonetic manner. It conveyed to their eyes a significance quite unconnected with the meaning of the Japanese word its sound conveyed to