China and the Chinese | Page 5

for instance, by the one single sound I.
The confusion likely to arise from such conditions needs not to be enlarged upon; it is at once obvious, and probably gave rise to the following sapient remark by a globe-trotting author, which I took from a newspaper in England:--
"In China, the letter I has one hundred and forty-five different ways of being pronounced, and each pronunciation has a different meaning."
It would be difficult to squeeze more misleading nonsense into a smaller compass. Imagine the agonies of a Chinese infant school, struggling with the letter I pronounced in 145 different ways, with a different meaning to each! It will suffice to say, what everybody here present must know, that Chinese is not in any sense an alphabetic language, and that consequently there can be no such thing as "the letter I."
When closely examined, this great difficulty of many words with but one common sound melts rapidly away, until there is but a fairly small residuum with which the student has to contend. The same difficulty confronts us, to a slighter extent, even in English. If I say, "I met a bore in Broadway," I may mean one of several things. I may mean a tidal wave, which is at once put out of court by the logic of circumstances. Or I may mean a wild animal, which also has circumstances against it.
To return to Chinese. In the first place, although there are no doubt 42,000 separate written characters in the Chinese language, about one-tenth of that number, 4200, would more than suffice for the needs of an average speaker. Adopting this scale, we have 420 sounds and 4200 words, or ten words to each sound,--still a sufficient hindrance to anything like certain intelligibility of speech. But this is not the whole case. The ten characters, for instance, under each sound, are distributed over four separate groups, formed by certain modulations of the voice, known as Tones, so that actually there would be only an average of 2? words liable to absolute confusion. Thus [yan1] yen^1 means "smoke"; [yan2] yen^2 means "salt"; [yan3] yen^3 means "an eye"; and [yan4] yen^4 means "a goose."
These modulations are not readily distinguished at first; but the ear is easily trained, and it soon becomes difficult to mistake them.
Nor is this all. The Chinese, although their language is monosyllabic, do not make an extensive use of monosyllables in speech to express a single thing or idea. They couple their words in pairs.
Thus, for "eye" they would say, not yen, which strictly means "hole," or "socket," but yen ching, the added word ching, which means "eyeball," tying down the term to the application required, namely, "eye."
In like manner it is not customary to talk about yen, "salt," as we do, but to restrict the term as required in each case by the addition of some explanatory word; for instance, [bái yán] "white salt," i.e. "table salt"; [hè yán] "black salt," i.e. "coarse salt"; all of which tends very much to prevent confusion with other words pronounced in the same tone.
There are also certain words used as suffixes, which help to separate terms which might otherwise be confused. Thus [guo3] kuo^3 means "to wrap," and [guo3] kuo^3 means "fruit," the two being identical in sound and tone. And yao kuo might mean either "I want fruit" or "I want to wrap." No one, however, says kuo for "fruit," but kuo tzu. The suffix tzu renders confusion impossible.
Of course there is no confusion in reading a book, where each thing or idea, although of the same sound and tone, is represented by a different symbol.
On the whole, it may be said that misconceptions in the colloquial are not altogether due to the fact that the Chinese language is poorly provided with sounds. Many persons, otherwise gifted, are quite unable to learn any foreign tongue.
Let us now turn to the machinery by means of which the Chinese arrest the winged words of speech, and give to mere thought and utterance a more concrete and a more lasting form.
The written language has one advantage over the colloquial: it is uniformly the same all over China; and the same document is equally intelligible to natives of Peking and Canton, just as the Arabic and Roman numerals are understood all over Europe, although pronounced differently by various nations.
To this fact some have attributed the stability of the Chinese Empire and the permanence of her political and social institutions.
If we take the written language of to-day, which is to all intents and purposes the written language of twenty-five hundred years ago, we gaze at first on what seems to be a confused mass of separate signs, each sign being apparently a fortuitous concourse of dots and dashes. Gradually, however, the eye comes to perceive that every now