Page:On the Stratification of Language - Muller - 1868.djvu/28

23 no suffixes by which one word is derived from another, no case terminations by which the relation of one word to another could be indicated. How, then, does Chinese distinguish between the son of the father, and the father of the son? Simply by position. Fú is father, tzé, son; therefore fú tzé is son of the father, tzé fú, father of the son. This rule admits of no exception but one. If a Chinese wants to say a wine glass, he puts wine first and glass last, as in English. If he wants to say, a glass of wine, he puts glass first and wine last. Thus i-pei thsieou, a cup of wine; thsieou pei, a wine-cup. If, however, it seems desirable tp mark the word which is in the genitive more distinctly, the word tchi may be placed after it, and we may say, fú tchi tzé, the son of the father. In the Mandarin dialect this tchi has become ti, and is added so constantly to the governed word, that, to all intents and purposes, it may be treated as what we call the termination of the genitive. Originally this tchi was a relative pronoun, and it continues to be used as such in the ancient Chinese.

It is perfectly true that Chinese possesses no derivative suffixes; that it cannot derive, for instance, kingly from a noun, such as king, or adjectives like visible and invisible from a verb videre, to see. Yet the same idea which we express by invisible, is expressed without difficulty in Chinese, only in a different way. They say kan-pu-kien, "behold-not-see," and this to them conveys the same idea as the English invisible.