Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume IV.djvu/479

 CHINA (LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE) 467 outside, i. e., outside head ; cWa-piih-to, nearly, i. e., differ not much; tsdng-teeen, formerly, i. e., from before; mdn-mdn-telh, slowly; cWdng-cWdng-telh, constantly ; ping-ping-gan- gan, comfortably ; ylh-tse, altogether, i. e., one arrangement; ylh-ting, certainly, i. e., one fixed. Prepositions are sometimes monosylla- bic, sometimes dissyllabic, as f4ng, with ; cK'oo- leadu, besides. Postpositions are of very fre- quent occurrence, as shdng, above ; Tied, below ; tseen, before. Most of the conjunctions of other languages are found in Chinese. They are either disjunctive, as hwo-she, or; or ad- versative, as jen-Hrh, however; or causative, as Tce-jen, since ; or conditional, as j6-she, if. In- terjections are very numerous in Chinese. To express aversion, they say pd-leadu-pd-leadu ; for sorrow, Wd-selh-leadu ; for commiseration, Wd-leen ; for surprise, ae-yd, &c. In composi- tion the adjective precedes the substantive, and the genitive precedes the nominative. The antecedent precedes the consequent; the verb is preceded by the subject and followed by the complement. The gender of persons is gener- ally expressed by ndn, male, and neti, female, followed by the syllable jin, person. For the lower animals tsze is used for the female and Jieung for the male. Sometimes also Tcung is used for the male and mod for the female. For persons, grammatical number is generally ex- pressed by the plural affix, mun, but it is fre- quently indicated by some expression in the phrase. Such terms as chung, a multitude, too, all, Iceae, altogether, tseuen, the whole, and to, many, indicate the plural number, ren- dering any affix to the noun unnecessary. The genitive case is generally expressed by the affix teih ; for the dative, Icelh is prefixed ; the in- strumental takes the prefix pe ; for the abla- tive fating is prefixed; for the vocative o is affixed ; for the locative, tsae is prefixed. There are many other syllables used with the same powers. The moods and tenses of verbs are generally understood by the context. Some- times for the present indicative joo-Mn, now, may be introduced between the pronoun and the verb. An indication of former time, as nd-she, at that time, will express the imperfect. The perfect may be expressed by the postfix Tco, or leaou, or wdn-leadu ; the negative is formed by placing muh-yew before the verb. The pluperfect is formed by putting e-Tcing before the verb and Tco after it. A future is made by placing tseang-lae before the verb ; yaou is also used. The second person of the imperative mood is made by affixing pd to the verb ; the third person may be made by placing yaou-ting between the pronoun and verb. The optative is formed by preposing pa-puh-tlh or hdn-puh-tth. A negative imperative is made by placing pe$ before the verb. A salient fea- ture in the language is the use of a class of words that are interposed between a number and the substantive with which it is connected, in the same manner as we use the word head in speaking of so many "head of cattle; " but whereas this phraseology is rare and exception- al in English, it is on the contrary of almost universal occurrence in Chinese. It is difficult to render such terms literally into English; but, to take an example for the sake of illustra- tion, a Chinese, instead of saying ylh-taou, a knife, or one knife, would say ylh-pd-taou, one handle knife, pd being used for most instru- ments held by a handle. Again, san-tfeaou shay, three serpents, Veaou being generally applied to objects where length is the charac- teristic. Chang is applied to objects of the sheet kind, as paper, mats, &c. ; keen is applied to houses, ledng to carriages, wei to persons, and Ico, which is of most general application, is used with human beings and inanimate ob- jects indefinitely. There are 20 or 30 such words in extensive use, and a much larger number of restricted application. By Euro- pean writers they have been variously named, classifiers, numerals, distinctive numeral par- ticles, numeratives, auxiliary substantives, &c. II. THE BOOK LANGUAGE. A knowledge of colloquial Chinese is doubtless an important step toward understanding the written lan- guage, as theoretically and hi the great leading features they are identical. Yet it is found that, even to a person well versed in one or more of the dialects, it is still necessary to make a special study before he can see his way through the native literature. Not only must he gain a familiarity with a consider- able number of the characters, but the gram- matical details have so much that is peculiar, that the application required is little if any less than what has been already spent in ac- quiring the spoken dialect. The more remark- able characteristics are conciseness of diction, the substitution of monosyllables for polysyl- lables, the employment of special particles, the absence of classifiers, and the more or less ex- tensive use of stereotyped phraseology, conse- crated by the usage of antiquity, and in many cases covering some recondite allusion, the re- sulting idea being such as nothing but the tra- ditional explanation could unfold. The 8hw6- wdn dictionary, which was completed early in the 2d century of our era, contains 9,353 dif- ferent characters and 1,163 variants. This number has gone on increasing from age to age since that time, so that a recent edition of that work gives the number of characters in the language as 52,325 ; and even that number might be considerably increased were all the technical characters and variants included. Buddhism alone, we are told, has added 26,430, but most of these are confined to the works of that religion. The imperial diction- ary of Kang-he, the most recent work of the class, gives 43,496; but when the obsolete forms and those to which no sound or meaning is attached are subtracted, the number re- maining and in actual use is reduced to 32,873. It is not to be supposed, however, that the profoundest scholar is master of anything like this number; 10,000 or 12,000 would probably