Page:The Chinese language and how to learn it.djvu/23

 鱔魚 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE the list of radicals at the beginning or end ol the dictionary, as the case may be, where it will be placed in the numerical order of the strokes of which it is composed, we shall be able to trace it to its place in the body of the volume, and there we shall find the character we are in search of placed in the list of characters of five strokes ranged under that radical. In an Anglo-Chinese dictionary the sound will naturally be given as well as the meaning, but as the Chinese have, obviously, no system of spelling such as is supplied in an alphabetical language, they have to adopt another method of indicating the pronunciation. By this method of spelling, if it can be so called, which was intro- duced by Buddhist monks from India,* the sound of a character is given by means of two other characters of which the first is the initial and the second the final ; these two are manipulated in such a way as to yield the sound required. It might here be mentioned that each Chinese word sound belongs to one of four (in composition, five) gradations of tone which can also be indicated by the above method, but an explanation of the tone system will find a more appropriate place in the remarks which follow on the spoken language. To illustrate the Chinese method of spelling the reader is referred once more to the character $||, an eel, which will be found in the list of phonetics of twelve strokes under the radical ^, a fish. Immediately below this character in the dictionary we shall find two others : one pronounced shang, and the next yen. Place them together shangyen; eliminate the termination of the first and the initial sound of the second sha(ngye)n and we get shan, which is the sound of the character we are looking for. In the case of characters of a complicated nature in which the radical is not easily distinguishable, the dictionaries supply a further assistance by furnishing a list of these characters arranged in order of the total number of strokes, including the radical, which is shown against the character. Where characters are formed by a com- bination of two or more radicals there is nothing to do but try them all until the right one is discovered. To return for a moment to the phonetics. A Chinese gets to
 * Probably about 610 A.D.