Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/479

XII.] phonetic compound in its other senses, distinguishing each by some suggestive mark: thus, adding an ear on either side might make it signify ' sound, audible noise;' a sign for 'water' written within it would intimate the meaning of ' sound, an arm of the sea;' a depending line and plummet, that of ' sound, to try the depth of anything.' For example, there is in China a certain simple sign having the pronunciation pe, and meaning 'white' (what the object represented is, and in virtue of what property it was chosen to signify this conception, is now no longer known); then, with the sign for 'tree' prefixed, it means ' pe, a kind of cypress;' with the sign for 'man,' it means ' pe, elder brother;' with the sign for 'manes,' it means ' pe, the vital principle in its existence after death;' and so forth. Some signs are thus very extensively used to form compound characters, in connection with various others that bear a phonetic value in the compound; two of those already instanced are among the most common of them: the sign for 'man' enters into nearly six hundred combinations, all denoting something that has a special relation to man; that for 'tree' enters into more than nine hundred, which denote kinds of trees, wood and things made of wood, and such like matters. Their analogy with the formative elements of spoken language is very evident; they are signs which limit the general value of the phonetic radical, putting it in a certain class or category of meanings.

The Chinese mode of writing, unlike the Egyptian, has been ready to forget and lose sight of its hieroglyphic origin, to convert its characters, when once the needed association was formed between them and their significance, into signs wholly conventional, bearing no traceable resemblance to the objects they originally depicted, and made liable to any modifications which practical convenience, or a sense for symmetry, or mere fancy, should suggest and recommend. In this, again, it offers a manifest analogy with what we have repeatedly shown to be the legitimate and laudable tendency of spoken language. The characters have passed through a variety of transitional forms on their way to that in which they are at present ordinarily written, and which was itself