Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/357

IX.] and bare, adjective), and found's (found from find, found, 'establish,' and found, 'cast'), and other the like. In the written language, much of this ambiguity is avoided, since each Chinese character represents a word with regard, not to its phonetic form alone, but to its meaning also —whence comes the strange anomaly that a language composed of but a thousand or two of words is written with an alphabet containing tens of thousands of different signs. The literary style is thus enabled to unite with sufficient intelligibility a wonderful degree of conciseness, to combine brevity and precision to a degree elsewhere unapproached. The spoken language is much more wordy, using, to secure the mutual understanding of speaker and hearer, various devices, which here and there approach very near to agglutination, although they always stop short of it. To no small extent, the Chinese is in practical use a language of groups of monosyllabic roots rather than of isolated monosyllables: a host of conceptions which we signify by single words, it denotes by a collocation of several words: thus, 'virtue' is represented by four cardinal virtues, faith-piety-temperance-justice; 'parent' by father-mother; exceedingly often, two nearly synonymous words are put together to express their common meaning, like way-path, for 'way' (such a collocation being mainly a device for suggesting to the mind the one signification in which two words, each of various meaning, agree with one another); very often, again, a "classifier," or word denoting the class in which a vocable is used, is appended to it, as when we say maple-tree, whale-fish, for maple and whale (many of these classifiers are of very peculiar sense and application); certain words, further, are virtual signs of parts of speech, as those meaning 'get,' 'come,' 'go,' added to verbs; 'place,' making nouns from verbs and adjectives; a relative particle, pointing out the attributive relation; objective particles, indicating an instrumental, locative, dative case; pluralizing words, meaning originally 'number, crowd, heap;' a diminutive sign, the word for 'child;' and so on. There has been here not a little of that attenuation and integration of