Page:China- Its State and Prospects.djvu/191

Rh short, with the circumflex. The "entering" or contracted tone, however, sometimes requires a different orthography; the concluding nasal being omitted, and the contracted vowel followed by the letter h, to shew that it is to be pronounced short. This exhibits in our Chinese dictionaries, alphabetically arranged, an increase of about one hundred words, though in fact the number of real Chinese sounds, unvaried by tones, is little more than three hundred. These three hundred words, if accentuated by the five tones, would give the sum of fifteen hundred distinguishable utterances in the mandarin dialect; but the Chinese do not avail themselves of all the advantages which their pronouncing system affords, and one thousand variations are the utmost actually in use. It necessarily follows, therefore, that they have many characters under one and the same sound. This constitutes a great difficulty in the communication of ideas, and renders mistakes both easy and frequent. In order to prevent the confusion likely to arise from this paucity of sounds, the Chinese are in the habit of associating cognates and synonymes, and of combining individual terms into set phrases, which are as regularly used in the accustomed form, as compound words in our own language. Hence the Chinese has become a language of phrases; and it is necessary to learn, not only the terms and the tones, but the system of collocation also; which in that country is the more important, on account of the paucity of words, and the number of terms resembling each other in sound, though differing in sense.

In the science of grammar, the Chinese have made no progress; and among the host of their literati, no one seems to have turned his attention to this subject.