Page:EB1911 - Volume 06.djvu/237

 two indispensable aids—a dictionary and a grammar. The Chinese have found no difficulty in producing the former (see Literature). Now what as to the grammar? He might reasonably expect a people so industrious in the cultivation of their language to have evolved some system of grammar which to a certain degree would help to smooth his path. And yet the contrary is the case. No set of rules governing the mutual relations of words has ever been formulated by the Chinese, apparently because the need of such rules has never been felt. The most that native writers have done is to draw a distinction between 實 字 and 虚 字 &ldquo;full&rdquo; and &ldquo;empty words,&rdquo; respectively, the former being subdivided into 活 字 &ldquo;living words&rdquo; or verbs, and 死 字 &ldquo;dead words&rdquo; or noun-substantives. By &ldquo;empty words&rdquo; particles are meant, though sometimes the expression is loosely applied to abstract terms, including verbs. The above meagre classification is their nearest approach to a conception of grammar in our sense. This in itself does not prove that a Chinese grammar is impossible, nor that, if constructed, it might not be helpful to the student. As a matter of fact, several attempts have been made by foreigners to deduce a grammatical system which should prove as rigid and binding as those of Western languages, though it cannot be said that any as yet has stood the test of time or criticism. Other writers have gone to the other extreme, and maintained that Chinese has no grammar at all. In this dictum, exaggerated as it sounds, there is a very substantial amount of truth. Every Chinese character is an indivisible unit, representing a sound and standing for a root-idea. Being free from inflection or agglutination of any kind, it is incapable of indicating in itself either gender, number or case, voice, mood, tense or person. Of European languages, English stands nearest to Chinese in this respect, whence it follows that the construction of a hybrid jargon like pidgin English presents fewer difficulties than would be the case, for instance, with pidgin German. For pidgin English simply consists in taking English words and treating them like Chinese characters, that is, divesting them of all troublesome inflections and reducing them to a set of root-ideas arranged in logical sequence. &ldquo;You wantchee my no wantchee&rdquo; is nothing more nor less than literally rendered Chinese: 你 要 我 不 要 &ldquo;Do you want me or not?&rdquo; But we may go further, and say that no Chinese character can be definitely regarded as being any particular part of speech or possessing any particular function absolutely, apart from the general tenor of its context. Thus, taken singly, the character 上 conveys only the general idea &ldquo;above&rdquo; as opposed to &ldquo;below.&rdquo; According to its place in the sentence and the requirements of common sense, it may be a noun meaning &ldquo;upper person&rdquo; (that is, a ruler); an adjective meaning &ldquo;upper,&rdquo; &ldquo;topmost&rdquo; or &ldquo;best&rdquo;; an adverb meaning &ldquo;above&rdquo;; a preposition meaning &ldquo;upon&rdquo;; and finally a verb meaning &ldquo;to mount upon,&rdquo; or &ldquo;to go to.&rdquo; 入 is a character that may usually be translated &ldquo;to enter&rdquo; as in 入 門 &ldquo;to enter a door&rdquo;; yet in the locution 入 木 &ldquo;enter wood,&rdquo; the verb becomes causative, and the meaning is &ldquo;to put into a coffin.&rdquo; It would puzzle grammarians to determine the precise grammatical function of any of the words in the following sentence, with the exception of 何 (an interrogative, by the way, which here happens to mean &ldquo;why&rdquo; but in other contexts is equivalent to &ldquo;how,&rdquo; &ldquo;which&rdquo; or &ldquo;what&rdquo;): 事 何 必 古 &ldquo;Affair why must ancient,&rdquo; or in more idiomatic English, &ldquo;Why necessarily stick to the ways of the ancients in such matters?&rdquo; Or take a proverbial saying like 少 所 見 多 所 怪, which may be correctly rendered &ldquo;The less a man has seen, the more he has to wonder at.&rdquo; It is one thing, however, to translate it correctly, and another to explain how this translation can be inferred from the individual words, of which the bald equivalents might be given as: &ldquo;Few what see, many what Strange.&rdquo; To say that &ldquo;strange&rdquo; is the literal equivalent of 怪 does not mean that 怪 can be definitely classed as an adjective. On the other hand, it would be dangerous even to assert that the word here plays the part of an active verb, because it would

be equally permissible to translate the above &ldquo;Many things are strange to one who has seen but little.&rdquo;

The Book Language.—Turning now to some of the more salient characteristics of the book language, with the object of explaining how it came to be so widely separated from common speech, we might reasonably suppose that in primitive times the two stood in much closer relation to each other than now. But it is certainly a striking fact that the earliest literary remains of any magnitude that have come down to us should exhibit a style very far removed from any possible colloquial idiom. The speeches of the Book of History (see Literature) are more manifestly fictitious, by many degrees, than the elaborate orations in Thucydides and Livy. If we cannot believe that Socrates actually spoke the words attributed to him in the dialogues of Plato, much less can we expect to find the ipsissima verba of Confucius in any of his recorded sayings. In the beginning, all characters doubtless represented spoken words, but it must very soon have dawned on the practical Chinese mind that there was no need to reproduce in writing the bisyllabic compounds of common speech. Chien &ldquo;to see,&rdquo; in its written form 見, could not possibly be confused with any other chien, and it was therefore unnecessary to go to the trouble of writing 看 見 k&lsquo;an-chien &ldquo;look-see,&rdquo; as in colloquial. There was a wonderful outburst of literary activity in the Confucian era, when it would seem that the older and more cumbrous form of Seal character was still in vogue. If the mere manual labour of writing was so great, we cannot wonder that all superfluous particles or other words that could be dispensed with were ruthlessly cut away. So it came about that all the old classical works were composed in the tersest of language, as remote as can be imagined from the speech of the people. The passion for brevity and conciseness was pushed to an extreme, and resulted more often than not in such obscurity that detailed commentaries on the classics were found to be necessary, and have always constituted an important branch of Chinese literature. After the introduction of the improved style of script, and when the mechanical means of writing had been simplified, it may be supposed that literary diction also became freer and more expansive. This did happen to some extent, but the classics were held in such veneration as to exercise the profoundest influence over all succeeding schools of writers, and the divorce between literature and pooular speech became permanent and irreconcilable. The book language