Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume IV.djvu/477

 CHINA (LANGUAGE AND LITEBATUBE) 465 guage of China, the most exaggerated no- tions were formed of its eccentricity and of the difficulty of its acquirement. A more in- timate acquaintance, however, tended to dis- pel the illusion, and to show that much of the singularity that appeared to attach to it was really due to the fact that the written medium preserved the key to that agglutination or word- building, the traces of which in other languages disappeared before those who used them be- gan to put their thoughts on record. It is true the language has very marked peculiarities, as the following observations will show ; but these are merely a special phase of the universal development of human speech, arrested to some extent at an early stage by the use of a written character. The neglect of most writers on the language of China to distinguish clearly be- tween the spoken and written forms, has re- sulted in the most confused notions entertained by those who are not familiar with the subject. That a close analogy exists between the oral and written media of communication cannot be denied ; and yet it is equally true that their re- spective peculiarities are too distinctly marked to admit of the identification of one with the other. It is difficult indeed to believe that people ever spoke in the curt and sententious style of the books, and we have no evidence to prove a closer approximation of the two forms in any preceding age than we find at the pres- ent day. Be that as it may, it is easily demon- strable that in the oral medium as we now find it we have to do with a polysyllabic language. That a contrary view should ever have ob- tained, appears due to the confusion of ideas above referred to. It has been said, and not without a show of reason, that English is near- er a monosyllabic tongue than the Chinese. The fact that Chinese happens to be written in monosyllabic symbols does not really affect the question. English might be syllabically writ- ten with similar phonograms; and were these to a certain extent at the same time ideograph- ic, the analogy would be perfect. The follow- ing sentence is taken at random from Thorn's " Chinese Speaker:" " "When a man goes forth to take a walk, his com-pan-ions may be pull- ing and haul-ing at him." Merely separating the syllables in this manner shows the whole theory of Chinese monosyllabism. Now look at the Chinese equivalent of this sentence: Tin chuh-lai tsow-taou, p&ng-yew-mun Id-ld- ' iy-chay. Here the groups connected by hy- phens are as inseparable in sense as are those in the English version ; and to dissever one of the syllables of pang-yew-mun, for instance, would do as much violence to the sense as a similar operation on the corresponding English term com-pan-ions. In the various dialects there are many polysyllabic words for which there are absolutely no characters. The num- ber of syllables in the language is, as might be expected, variously estimated by different au- thorities. Morrison, basing his system on that of the native dictionary Wod chay yun fod, gives 411 simple vocables; but taking into consideration the varieties produced by the aspirates, they amount to 533 ; and by the further distinctions of the tones, the number is swelled to nearly 1,600. Premare, in his No- titia Lingua Sinicae, gives a list of 1,331 as the complete catalogue. Gutzlaff estimates the whole number at 1,781. Mr. Wade, who has given uncommon attention to the subject for more than ten years, makes the whole number of simple and aspirated vocables in the Peking dialect 420, while by the application of tones the number is increased to 1,454. Probably the number of syllables in the Nanking and western Mandarin dialects may be somewhat in excess of this. The Fun ydn, a native dic- tionary of the Canton dialect, gives the num- ber of syllables when affected by the tones and aspirates as 1,582. Drs. Maclay and Baldwin, in their Foochow dictionary, which is based on the native work Ts'elh lin pa, yin ho ting, a dictionary of the Foochow dialect, gives a list of 495 syllables that may be formed without as- pirates or tones ; but that is considerably more than the number in actual use. Even admit- ting that a perfectly accurate estimate could be made, it would doubtless be found that the numbers vary considerably for Different parts of the empire. Mr. Edkins, who has given more attention to the sounds of the Chinese language than almost any one else, tells us that there has been a considerable secular transfor- mation going on in the pronunciation from an- cient to modern times ; many relics of the older language being still preserved in the local dia- lects. The Mandarin or general dialect of China, which is that of the official class every- where, is also the common language, with slight modifications, of several of the northern and western provinces. This is marked by the almost entire absence of consonantal termina- tions, n, ng, and rh being the only ones admit- ted. The provincial dialects of the south, however, have largely preserved the finals fc, m, p, and t, and in one or other of them nearly all the letters of our alphabet may be found, either as initials or finals. It would be almost impossible to give even an approximation to the number of words in any of the dialects, made up with these syllables. In Stent's vo- cabulary of the Peking dialect, the most recent work of that class, the author says : " It does not contain all the combinations of characters, but a selection only of useful ones (amounting to upward of 20,000) sufficient for the use of beginners." It should be remarked, however, that while a large proportion of these are polysyllabic words, there are a great number of them also formed by combining two or more words. No attempt having been made, even by foreign students, to reduce colloquial Chinese to an alphabetic system, the nearest approach has been to lay down two series of letters to represent the initials and finals, by which every syllable may be spelt. The following two lists, with one slight modification, are those adopted