Page:Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (IA journalofstrait121878roya).pdf/231

 on the lips of a Chinaman utterly ignorant of English does sound something like "pidgin." But I must confess that this seems to me a rather far fetched origin though I cannot suggest anything better: nor, so far as I am aware, can any one else.

As regards the formation of this queer dialect we find less difficulty in arriving at a conclusion.

Of the natural tendency of language to assimilate words from sources foreign to its own origin we have numerous examples in everyday life. Hindostanee words have become a part and parcel of the English spoken in Great Britain, while numerous Spanish expressions are current in the United States. Spanish itself. again, has in Uruguay and Paraguay admitted a large admixture of Guarani, and the conservative Chinese have with equal facility adopted many words from Manchu and Mongolian. In all these cases the intruding vocables have at first passed as "slang" until custom has stamped them with the mint-mark of respectability. No visible effect is produced upon the languages in question by the presence of these strangers. Yet dialects are to be found which, beginning under similar circumstances, have so lost their original indentity [sic] in the process as to have become veritable philological "bastards." Such are the lingua franca of the Mediterranean, and the gitano or gypsey language of that vast tribe, of Hindoo origin. which still exists in every European country, its members, like Ishmael of old, having "their hand against every man, and every man's hand against them." The most recent of these bastard dialects, and necessarily less perfect in its individuality than those above-mentioned, is the Pidgin English under notice, which at the present day is spoken by some hundreds of thousands of Chinese upon the seaboard of their empire, and even threatens to extend to the coasts of Japan.

There was also, singularly enough, a native Chinese dialect in process of formation, which was to the colloquial of the district in which it existed what "pidgin" is to pure English. One effect of the Taiping rebellion, which caused an influx of natives from the districts of Central China to Shanghai, was to cause the formation of a fused dialect, consisting of words indifferently taken from those spoken at Shanghai, Canton, and Nanking. No great growth of this speech has been noticeable since the rebellion was crushed: but it bade fair at one time to contribute another to the already numerous varieties spoken in different parts of the empire.