CHINA 



195 



Hon;,'-Uong, published iii 1878 a 'Concise Chine-e 

 l)id ionai \ in \\liii-li tin- phonetic constituents are 

 i-c.lii.-i-.l to s>i. These, with tin- 214 ideograms, 

 having been It-arm-d, 1()98 characters in all, the 

 stmlrnt has mastered the elements of all the 

 Chinese characters Pronunciation is constantly 

 varying, ami his reading will often be far from 

 gn ing 'the present truth' of the names of many 

 M-ters ; luit a knowledge of these phonetic con- 

 st it uents does much to lighten the strain upon the 

 memory in learning Chinese. 



The monosyllabic utterances, however, available 

 to name the 43,000 characters are few indeed. In 

 Pekinese they an- only 4'2(>. Kvcn if there were as 

 inanv .1- KHK) different syllables in the language, 

 equally divided among the characters, more than 

 forty meanings would belong to each. In the 

 * Syllabic Dictionary ' of the late Dr Williams, 

 containing only 12,527 characters, placed under 552 

 syllables, there are about 150 characters placed 

 under tin- monosyllable i ( = ee in see). To the eye 

 tin-re is no difficulty in distinguishing all these fs ; 

 but to the ear such discrimination, unassisted other- 

 wise, is impossible. To assist it, there is a system 

 of t itnes, the number of which varies in different 

 dialects. According- to the tone in which the mono- 

 syllable is pronounced, its meaning is different ; 

 and this renders what we call a ' good ear ' desir- 

 able in learning the speech of China. There are 

 other devices by which the difficulty occasioned by 

 the slender syllabary of Chinese speech is overcome, 

 such as the combination of synonyms, and the 

 multiplication of particles hardly to be found in 

 the dictionaries. As a consequence, while concise- 

 ness is a characteristic of good Chinese composi- 

 ion, the spoken language is verbose e.g. the 

 fable of 'The Fox and the Grapes,' told in 131 

 English words, is rendered in good Chinese by 85 

 characters, while a version or it in Cantonese 

 illo(| nial contains 163 words. Still the colloquial 

 speech is not difficult of acquisition. The writer 

 had often occasion to remark that the children 

 of English families resident in China, who were 

 ot restricted from intercourse with the Chinese, 

 spoke the colloquial more fluently and readily than 

 the English which was spoken by their parents. 



After the Buddhist missionaries came to China, 

 and scholars got some acquaintance with the use 

 of the Sanskrit alphabet, they began to devise a 

 method of spelling (so to speak) their characters, 

 dividing each monosyllable into an initial and a 

 final sound, and then joining two other characters 

 together, one to give the initial, and the other, 

 always in the same tone as the character thus 

 spelled, to give its h'nal sound. This method, though 

 cumbrous, might have been of use to the student if 

 the same characters had always been employed for 

 the same initial and the same final sounds, as in 

 Chalmers's 'Concise Dictionary.' But every lexico- 

 grapher adopted his own characters at his pleasure 



e.g. the character jig (It = I + i) is spelled in one 

 dictionary by Jpf (-iang) and [p (ch + t ) ; in a 

 second by Bra (Hang) and ji (Mi, anciently called 



i) ; and in a third by Jj (f-iang) and ]^ (t ). The 

 K'ang-hsi lexicon, after reciting these three spell- 

 ings, adds that the sound is the same as (If , which 



_~T 



is the phonetic element, It. This spelling only dis- 

 tracts the student ; the Chinese scholars faifed to 

 apprehend the nature of the alphabetic signs or 

 letters. 



From the analysis of the characters which has 

 been given, their inconjugable and indeclinable 

 character, and their versatility such that one of 

 them may perform the r6le of most of our ' parts of 



speech,' it in evident that the attempt to apply to 

 thriii the categories and rules of grammar on the 

 model of our Aryan languages munt be very much 

 love's lalionr lost ; ' yet composition with them 

 has its own rules, which are not dillicult to learn. 

 AH Dr Marshtnan expressed it in his grammar of 

 1814, ' the whole of Chinese grammar depends on 

 1 --it ion.' Under the skilful application of this 

 principle, the Chinese characters weave the web of 

 thought with the rapidity of engine-driven shuttles; 

 and there has grown up an immense Chinese litera- 

 ture. 



Before entering on a brief description of that 

 literature, a paragraph may be allowed to what is 

 called ' pidgin English,' a sort of lingua franca, 

 which grew up between Chinese on the seaboard 

 and foreigners, for the purpose of intercommunica- 

 tion, while neither party had the means or the 

 wish to acquire an accurate knowledge of the 

 language or the other. ' Pidgin ' is a Chinese 

 attempt to pronounce our word ' business ; ' and 

 the materials of the lingo are nearly all English 

 words similarly represented or misrepresented, and 

 called 'broken English.' The idiom, on the other 

 hand, is entirely that of colloquial Chinese. 

 Foreigners get to master it in a snort time, so as 

 to carry on long conversations by means of it, and 

 to transact important affairs of business. Dr 

 Williams (vol. i. p. 832) gives the following ex- 

 ample of it, taken from the Chinese Repository, 

 vol. x. : A gentleman meets a Chinese acquaintance, 

 accompanying a coffin which is being conveyed 

 along the street, and asks him who is dead ( ' who 

 hab die?'). 'No man hab catchee die,' is the 

 answer. ' This one piecy coffin I just now give my 

 olo fader. He lilcee too much counta my 

 numba one ploper ; s'pose he someteem catchee 

 die, can usee he.' 'So fashion, eh? How muchee 

 plice (price) can catchee one alia same same?' 

 ' I tinky can get one alia same so fashion one tonsan 

 dolla, so ; this hab first chop hansom, lo ! ' There 

 is often a charming raciness about such conversa- 

 tions, and one occasionally sees in his Chinese 

 interlocutor the working of the mind which has 

 been described in the formation of the third or 

 composite class of characters. For instance, a 

 Chinese boy (all servants are called boys) once came 

 to ask the writer to intercede for him with his 

 master, who was treating him, he thought, un- 

 justly. 'He one sarcee ( saucy = bad) man,' he 

 said ; ' he no hab topside pidgin ; ' meaning that 

 his master had no religion, no dealing with the 

 powers above. This jargon is passing away. 

 Chinese who know English, and English who 

 know Chinese, are increasing from year to year. 

 See C. G. Leland's Pidgin-English Sing-song (\8~6). 



How vast and varied the Chinese literature is may 

 be seen from a very brief and imperfect analysis of 

 the contents of the catalogue raisonnt of the works 

 collected by an order of the K'ien-lung reign in 

 1722, to be printed or reprinted as a great national 

 library. The catalogue is arranged in four divi- 

 sions under the name of K'A, 'Arsenals,' or ' Maga- 

 zines : ' the first, in 44 chapters, containing works 

 on the classics and dictionaries necessary in the 

 study of them ; the second, in 46 chapters, works 

 of history ; the third, in 57 chapters, works on 

 philosophy and the arts ; and the fourth, in 53 

 chapters, works of poetry and belles-lettres. 



Tne classics are the Confucian books, and a 

 few others, on which an amount of commentary 

 has been expended certainly not inferior either 

 in voluminous-ness or in patient care to what has 

 lieen put forth on our sacred Scriptures ; and it 

 still goes on without abatement. A collection 

 of books on them by a multitude of scholars of 

 the present dynasty was published at Canton 

 in 1829 in 1400 chapters. The histories are 



