Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/480

458 established more than a thousand years since: some of these intermediate forms are still preserved in monuments and ancient documents, and to a certain extent even now employed for special uses—as the older phases of many a spoken tongue are kept to the knowledge of posterity by like means; and as a Frenchman, for example, of the present day may clothe his thoughts, upon occasion, in an Old French or a Latin dress. Their current shape has been determined mainly by the customary instruments of writing and the manner of their use—these have exercised all the modifying and adapting force which in a spoken tongue belongs to a powerful euphonic tendency, like that which has made all Italian words end in vowels, and has worn off from French vocables the syllables which followed after the accented one in their Latin originals. And so thoroughly has their hieroglyphic origin been covered up and concealed by these transformations that no one, from their present aspect, would venture even to conjecture that they had started from outlines of natural objects; nor would the older preserved documents suffice to prove this; the truth lay only within reach of the Chinese themselves, as having access to traditional information from yet more ancient times. We have no right to be surprised, then, if the onomatopoetic beginnings of speech, dating from a period compared with which the origin of Chinese writing is but as yesterday, are no longer to be distinctly traced in the worn and altered facts of such language as is now accessible to our researches.

Another set of causes has powerfully influenced the development of the Chinese written expression: namely, the poverty of the spoken tongue, and the felt need of giving it an aid and support from without. The system of signs combines a phonetic and ideographic nature in a manner peculiarly its own. It is rather an auxiliary language, than a reduction of speech to writing. It supplies the defects and removes the ambiguities of the language it represents; it might be learned and used without any regard paid to its phonetic equivalents; and if the Chinese were but willing to forego converse by the tongue and ear, substituting for them the hand and eye, it would answer the purposes of their