China and the Chinese | Page 3

from the same part of the country and speak the same patois, between officials and their servants, between judge and prisoner. Thus, in every court of justice throughout the Empire the proceedings are carried on in Mandarin, although none of the parties to the case may understand a single word. The prosecutor, on his knees, tells his story in his native dialect. This story is rendered into Mandarin by an official interpreter for the benefit of the magistrate; the magistrate asks his questions or makes his remarks in Mandarin, and these are translated into the local dialect for the benefit of the litigants. Even if the magistrate knows the dialect himself,--as is often the case, although no magistrate may hold office in his own province,--still it is not strictly permissible for him to make use of the local dialect for magisterial purposes.
It may be added that in all large centres, such as Canton, Foochow, and Amoy, there will be found, among the well-to-do tradesmen and merchants, many who can make themselves intelligible in something which approximates to the dialect of Peking, not to mention that two out of the above three cities are garrisoned by Manchu troops, who of course speak that dialect as their native tongue.
Such is Mandarin. It may be compared to a limited extent with Urdu, the camp language of India. It is obviously the form of colloquial which should be studied by all, except those who have special interests in special districts, in which case, of course, the patois of the locality comes to the front.
We will now suppose that the student has made up his mind to learn Mandarin. The most natural thing for him, then, to do will be to look around him for a grammar. He may have trouble in finding one. Such works do actually exist, and they have been, for the most part, to quote a familiar trade-mark, "made in Germany." They are certainly not made by the Chinese, who do not possess, and never have possessed, in their language, an equivalent term for grammar. The language is quite beyond reach of the application of such rules as have been successfully deduced from Latin and Greek.
The Chinese seem always to have spoken in monosyllables, and these monosyllables seem always to have been incapable of inflection, agglutination, or change of any kind. They are in reality root-ideas, and are capable of adapting themselves to their surroundings, and of playing each one such varied parts as noun, verb (transitive, neuter, or even causal), adverb, and conjunction.
The word [wo] wo, which for convenience' sake I call "I," must be rendered into English by "me" whenever it is the object of some other word, which, also for convenience' sake, I call a verb. It has further such extended senses as "egoistic" and "subjective."
For example: [wo ài ta] wo ai t'a.
The first of these characters, which is really the root-idea of "self," stands here for the pronoun of the first person; the last, which is really the root-idea of "not self," "other," stands for the pronoun of the third person; and the middle character for the root-idea of "love."
This might mean in English, "I love him," or "I love her," or "I love it,"--for there is no gender in Chinese, any more than there is any other indication of grammatical susceptibilities. We can only decide if "him," "her," or "it" is intended by the context, or by the circumstances of the case.
Now if we were to transpose what I must still call the pronouns, although they are not pronouns except when we make them so, we should have--
[ta ài wo] t'a ai wo
"he, she, or it loves me," the only change which the Chinese words have undergone being one of position; while in English, in addition to the inflection of the pronouns, the "love" of the first person becomes "loves" in the third person.
Again, supposing we wished to write down--
"People love him (or her),"
we should have--
[rén ai ta] jen ai t'a,
in which once more the noticeable feature is that the middle character, although passing from the singular to the plural number, suffers no change of any kind whatever.
Further, the character for "man" is in the plural simply because such a rendering is the only one which the genius of the Chinese language will here tolerate, helped out by the fact that the word by itself does not mean "a man," but rather what we may call the root-idea of humanity.
Such terms as "a man," or "six men," or "some men," or "many men," would be expressed each in its own particular way.
"All men," for instance, would involve merely the duplication of the character jen:--
[rén rén ai ta] jen jen ai t'a.
It is the same with tenses in Chinese. They are not brought out by inflection, but