Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/129

Rh improvement of society. They are not content unless they see a moral or political motive prompting all the actions of their early sages.

But if speech is nature's gift to man how comes it to vary from place to placetime to time [sic]? That it changes from place to place has been declared to be the working of natural law. It is nature's, not man's doing that the accent and pronunciation of words alter, that one term rises and another falls out of use as generation follows generation. But how is it that not only has the language of China been always unlike the dialects of the barbarian tribes in her midst and on her frontiers, but also that this language itself varies from district to district? The answer is that here too we have the work of nature. The "wind air" and the "soil and water," that is, the natural conditions of a place, affect the physical constitutions of the inhabitants, and thence gradually influence also their moral qualities. Then in course of time the character and conduct of the people react on the climatic conditions of a place, over which they exercise a mysterious but undoubted influence. Thus "wind air" (風氣) means not only the physical qualities of a district, but also its moral character. It is the differences in climate, physical constituents, and moral character which make the variations of dialects. "People differ in the quality of their natural dispositions and in the language they speak; this is the spontaneous result of climate, and the product of continued practice." So writes one native author who knew by experience something about the varieties of human speech. That the inhabitants of one place, a popular writer tells us, are firm and manly while those of another place are the opposite, that people here are smart and there slow, that the language of this district is not understood by the inhabitants of that, all result from the assimilation of the local climatic influences by the people. The children of barbarous tribes (戎夷), writes another, all make the same noises when they are infants, but speak differently when they grow up, and the