Page:The Chinese language and how to learn it.djvu/35

 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 17 be as well at this stage to state that China, which, during the early part of her history was often divided into small states, is not a country in which one spoken language prevails, varied only by provincialisms, but, to quote again from Professor Giles, there are about eight well-marked dialects, all clearly of a common stock, but go distinct as to constitute eight different languages, any two of which are quite as unlike as English and Dutch. These dialects, as pointed out by Professor Giles,* fringe the coast line of China, and between Canton, on the extreme south, and Shanghai, near the mouth of the Yangtsze, we encounter no less than seven dialects, each so different from the other as to be quite unintelligible to any but a native of the particular district in which the dialect prevails. Throughout the region of the Yangtsze Valley, as it has now come to be called, and from thence northwards, we " come into the range of the great dialect, popularly known as ' Mandarin,' which sweeps round behind the narrow strip of coast occupied by the various dialects above mentioned, and dominates a hinterland constituting about four-fifths of China proper." Throughout this region, " Mandarin," or the official dialect, will be understood, and Mandarin in its purest form is now the Mandarin of Peking, or the Court dialect, which is to other forms of Mandarin somewhat as Parisian French is to the provincial dialects of France. It is to Mandarin, therefore, and especially to Pekingese Mandarin, that the following remarks will apply. Theoretically, Chinese colloquial is not a difficult language to acquire. The street " coolie " of Peking, whose speech is practically the same as that of the highest official, has a vocabulary of a few hundred words at the outside which are amply sufficient for his wants. He can say anything he wishes to say with this stock of words, and is never at a loss for an expression. A foreign child brought up under the charge of a Chinese nurse will pick up Chinese words with much greater facility than it will imbibe English, and will be talking fluently in the vernacular long before it can do more than babble in the language of its parents, and yet a foreign adult may spend a lifetime in the country and not know ten words of Chinese. No traveller can pass two months in Japan
 * China and the Chinese, p. 7.