CHINESE AND INDO-EUROPEAN 



ROOTS AND ANALOGUES, 



By PLINY EARLE CHASE. 



The Chinese has usually been regarded as essentially different from 

 the Indo-European languages, not only in its grammatical construc- 

 tion, but also in its radical etymology. Resemblances have been 

 occasionally pointed out, and some students have coincided with 

 Chevalier Bunsen in the opinion that the old Chinese is the nearest 

 living approach to the original language of the human race,* but it 

 has generally been assumed that the resemblances were merely acci- 

 dental, and no systematic attempt appears to have been made to render 

 this venerable idiom tributary to the fascinating though bewildering 

 investigation of linguistic germs. The peculiarities of its written 

 characters, the difficulties connected with the acquisition of a lan- 

 guage so different from most others in its modes of expression, and 

 the puzzling variety of signification attached to each of its syllables, 

 are all formidable obstacles to the comparative philologist. And yet 

 the peculiarities of its script are only such as are necessarily attendant 

 on ideographic symbols, which are the most simple and undoubtedly 

 the most ancient visible representatives of speech ; difficulty of ac- 

 quisition is ordinarily one of the most efficient stimuli to exertion ; 

 and variety of meaning is a certain indication of age and copiousness, 

 and a probable evidence of affiliation with other dialects. 



A language that has been spoken by one-fourth of the inhabitants 

 of the globe for more than four thousand years, and probably with 

 little material alteration, either in meaning, construction, or pronun- 

 ciation, might naturally be supposed to preserve in its vocabulary 

 much of the debris of the primitive speechj- of mankind ; and if it 



=* "The Monument of Antediluvian Speech." — Brit. Assoc. Rep., for 1847, 

 p. 299. 



t I say "primitive speech," because, even if original unity of speech is denied, 

 there is at least unity of mental and vocal organization which would lead to re- 

 semblances in expression. 



