Page:Chinese Local Dialects Reduced to Writing- An Outline of the System Adopted for Romanizing the Dialect of Amoy (IA jstor-592283).pdf/2

 CHINESE LOCAL DIALECTS REDUCED TO WRITING.

Chinese written language has long been considered, by western scholars, as the most difficult language in the world. Taking its origin from hieroglyphics, in the remote ages of antiquity, it has been variously modified, until, in its present form, it may for most purposes be considered simply as an ideographic language.

From five to ten thousand characters, many of them of complicated structure, having various significations, and a variety of pronunciations in different connections, must all be familiar to the student, before he can use it with facility as a medium of communicating thought, or acquiring knowledge. Ten years or more are needed for Chinese youths to acquire this amount of knowledge.

The Chinese are called a literary people. The children of the poor often rise to eminence as scholars and statesmen; but it is well known to every one who has spent many years in China, that multitudes can read books with considerable fluency who have little knowledge of the signification of what they read. The idiom of the written language is considerably different from the spoken, and a degree of brevity is allowed which in the spoken language would render it to a great degree unintelligible. The pronunciation of the characters in many dialects is remarkably different from the spoken language used to express the same ideas.

The honor that is always attached to a knowledge of letters, leads multitudes of parents to send their children to school while they are too young to labor, but the pressure of poverty and the cares of an increasing family require that they should be put to some remunerative employment by the time they arrive at ten or twelve years of age. At this age they have learned to pronounce, it may be, three or