Page:China- Its State and Prospects.djvu/192

168 They have not learned to distinguish the parts of speech, or to define and designate case, gender, number, person, mood, or tense; they neither decline their nouns, nor conjugate their verbs, while regimen and concord are with them based on no written rules. Not that the language is incapable of expressing these ideas, or that a scheme of grammar could not be drawn up for the Chinese tongue; but the natives themselves have no notion of such distinctions, and could hardly be made to comprehend them. They have treatises on the art of speaking and writing, but these handle the subject in a manner peculiar to themselves. They divide their words into "living and dead," "real and empty;" a "living word" is a verb, and "a dead word" a substantive; while both of these are called "real," in distinction from particles, which are termed "empty." They also distinguish words into "important" and "unimportant." The chief aim of Chinese writers is to dispose the particles aright, and he who can do this is denominated a clever scholar. As for the distinction between noun, pronoun, verb, and participle, they have never thought of it; and use words occasionally in each of these forms, without any other change than that of position or intonation. They have terms for expressing the manner and time of an action, with the number and gender of individuals; but they more frequently leave these things to be gathered from the context, imagining that such auxiliary words disfigure rather than embellish the sentence. To an European, their composition appears indefinite, and sometimes unintelligible; but to a native, this terse and sententious mode of writing, is both elegant and intelligible. In conversation they are sometimes more diffuse, but in composition they