Page:The Chinese language and how to learn it.djvu/37

 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 19 On the other hand, any one who will take the trouble can acquire a sufficient vocabulary at the end of a few months to make his ordinary wants known, or to travel anywhere without the aid of an interpreter. If he wishes to get beyond this elementary stage he must make up his mind for some very up-hill work. In later chapters an attempt is made to assist the student in acquiring such a knowledge of the spoken language as will enable him to carry qn an ordinary conversation. At the present stage it will suffice to indicate in general terms a few of the difficulties with which the learner has to contend, together with certain marked differences between the written and the spoken language. The first of these difficulties is undoubtedly intonation, which, as stated above, is also an important feature in Chinese composition. The Chinese language is restricted in the matter of sounds, of which there are, in the Peking dialect, about four hundred. It follows therefore that many words must have the same sound. In writing, this deficiency could naturally be ignored, as each ideograph speaks for itself, but, in speaking, it is evident that unless some means were devised by which words of the same sound could be distinguished, much confusion would result. But there is a system by which these sounds are sub-divided. In the first place, a considerable multiplication is effected by the expedient of duplicating many sounds having certain initial consonants by the interposition of an aspirate between the initial consonant and the vowel. By many Irishmen such a word as " chair " would be pronounced ch'air, with a strong aspirate after the ch. So, in Chinese, we have Chi and Ch'i, tang and fang, pa and p'a, and very many others, adding a large percentage to the number of sounds. But this number is still more appreciably increased by the pronunciation of the same sounds in different tones or inflections of the voice. Take, for instance, the sound chi. Under this sound are ranged no less than 135 characters, all pronounced chi. Although the number of conversational words pronounced chi is not so numerous as the written words, there is, none the less, a considerable number. We have, to quote a very few, chi, a chicken, chi, excited, chi, to push, chi, to remember. How are we to know which is which ? The way they are distinguished is by intonation. The first chi is pronounced in an absolutely even tone, the voice