Page:Oriental Religions - China.djvu/435

 sound being, as we constantly see, expressed by very different vocables for different minds. But a further difficulty lies in the fact that onomatopoeia is so often the result of a conscious word-building, which belongs to the latest instead of the earliest phenomena of language. It is a curious commentary on the theory before us, that words of imitative origin are actually less frequent in languages admitted to be very old than in others that are young, living, and productive. It abounds in German, and is scarcely discernible in Chinese. The lively Greeks used it most in ancient times, the older Shemites least. Benlœw, after an extended comparison of tongues in this respect, even concludes that this feature is a pure result of civilization. For my own mind no theory can possibly be adequate which so imperfectly recognizes the nature and resources of spontaneity in the formation of words, as to refer them wholly to a mimetic tendency. But granting a fair amount of influence to this tendency in primitive speech, we find in it no evidence of monosyllabic origins; the sounds of animals and natural phenomena being for the most part unsuited for human imitation in such simple ways. As a part of the natural effort to express thoughts and things by suggestive representations or images, so to speak, addressed to the ear, while words are as yet lacking, the mimetic tendency corresponds to picture-writing for the eye, and testifies to the primitive powers of imagination and creative art.

Supposed inorganic nature of the Chinese.

Such peculiarities of the Chinese language as its rigid monosyllabism, admitting only a vowel preceded by supposed a consonant, and sometimes followed by a nasalization; the absence of distinctions of number, gender, or mood in the structure of the words, and