Page:Chinese spoken language.djvu/21

Rh only one thousand six hundred and twenty of these sounds have characters arranged under them.

To compensate for this paucity of monosyllables, two or more are often united together, forming real polysyllables, to express single ideas. By this means the number of words is increased to several thousands, and as regards its richness and variety of expression, this dialect is but little inferior to many alphabetic languages.

It will be seen in the table, that the orthography of some words is changed, as they are declined through the different tones. In rapid speaking, words in the third and seventh tones are but slightly distinguishable from the first tone; and in such cases the orthography reverts toward the form of the corresponding word in the first tone. Yet when spoken deliberately, the tones are readily distinguished, and the orthography varies with the tones, as shown in the table.

Nouns.
Nouns, like other Chinese words, are incapable of inflexion. Gender, number, number, person, and case, are determined either by the addition of other words, or by the position a word occupies in the sentence.

Case. – The subject nominative precedes, and the predicate nominative follows the verb, as in English. The accusative case is places after transitive verbs and prepositions, and is only distinguished by its position in a sentence. But in many instances, the accusative precedes the verb in the imperative mood, as chü pong3 chü-ka3, book place book-case; that is, place the book in the bookcase. This construction is very common, though not always adopted.

The dative and ablative cases are often used without any distinguishing mark, though they are sometimes preceded by a preposition. The genitive case of nouns is formed by adding ki5, his, hers, its, or theirs, after the noun, as sung5 ki5 nëng5, ship’s men; that is, sailors, or boatmen; Tüng kuoh4 ki5 nëng5, Central kingdom’s men; that is, Chinamen. The genitive is often followed by the name of the thing possessed, without any intervening word, as sung5 nëng5, boatmen, sailors; Tüng kuoh4 nëng5, men of China; Kuoh4 hò7, nation’s title, or national title. But in such cases, the noun in the genitive may generally be regarded as an adjective, qualifying the following noun.

Gender. – The gender of nouns is indicated by words denoting male and female, either directly or indirectly, as nang5, male; and nü2, for female. These are general terms, applicable to any living beings, and are placed before the nouns which they qualify. These terms are but seldom used in speaking; they belong more properly to the written language.