Page:Synoptical studies in the Chinese character (1874).djvu/9



STUDY of the written language of China is invariably marred—in its early stages, by an irresistible tendency to confound such characters as resemble each other in general outline and appearance;—later on, even after analysis has been some time called into play, by an inability to retain in the memory without constant application those characters and groups of characters which, differing perhaps only by a dot or a dash, offer little or no handle for association of ideas, but require in each particular instance a separate mnemonic effort. This last difficulty has been felt to some extent by native scholars and obviated in a great measure by the numerous and exhaustive works on orthography which from time to time have been published throughout the empire. Anyone, however, who will turn to the section headed 分毫字辨 in the 問奇一覽 to the third volume of the 字林通考 to K'ang Hsi's chapter on 辨似, or to the 字學舉隅 in either of its four editions, will see at a glance that the stumbling-blocks of the native and the foreigner are very rarely identical; to speak more correctly, that the difficulties experienced by a foreign tyro would be ridiculously out of place in works prepared for the use of graduates desirous only of giving the finishing touches to an almost faultless orthography before becoming candidates for admission into the Han Lin Yüan. For, judging from the collections above mentioned, the blunders of the native are chiefly confined to characters written with the same radical and slightly differing phonetics, the majority of which are, if not actually obsolete, at least very uncommon. The foreign student, on the other hand, is often at a loss to distinguish between any characters at all similar in form which afford no guide through the phonetic or the radical either to their sound or sense. Of such a class are 左 and 右, which would find no place in native