Page:Essays on the Chinese Language (1889).djvu/395

Rh have seen, a new language, one very unlike any of the barbarian tongues with which they had been hitherto acquainted. The Indian missionaries taught their brethren in China the Sanskrit language and grammar, and the Chinese have never been attracted to any other foreign language as they were to Sanskrit. Its alphabet alone was a great study, with its division into vowels and consonants, its physical classification of the letters, and rules for the combinations of these. The most simple and elementary of these combinations were learned by rote and repeated aloud. The learner in China went through these tasks at first perhaps only to aid him in acquiring a knowledge of the language, but afterwards also for a higher purpose. For the utterance aloud, after formalities duly observed, of sounds like haa, hd, hi, hi, ho, hu, hum was very potent over spiteful dragons and all evil spirits that work unseen. Then the inflections of the nouns and verbs in Sanskrit were also new to the Chinese who did not know at first how to treat them. They were scarcely prepared to recognize the inflections as modifying the meaning of the root or theme and styled them, accordingly, mere ** vocal auxiliaries " or "voice modulations." In time, however, they learned to distinguish the uses of the inflections, and to denote them or express their meanings by Chinese characters. Thus we find the Accusative denoted by pien {j^), which means "side** or "place." The Instrumental is expressed by ku (&), because of, on account of: the Dative by yu (^), to or with; the Locative by chiing (»4»), in, within. The Genitive is sometimes denoted by the particle chih {^), but frequently it and the Ablative are left to be inferred from the context without any distinguishing addition. In verbs the Conditional mood is represented by jo (g), if; the Future tense by tang (^), ought; and Past tenses by i (g,); ^ particle indicative of past time.^ When the Chinese ^

The inflecfciona are explained and examples given in those technical treatises of which the ChH-chiu-yu-Uao (4j Jl X ^) ^^ ^^ example. The translations for the inflections given in the text are taken from Chinese translations of Sanskrit books in the course of a comparison of original and translation. In Chinese (and Japanese) books on Sanskrit Grammar OhH-chiu (-j it) uieau Nouns and Verbs, the former being so called from the number of their cases, and the latter from the number of their moods and teases.