EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



Japanese; and in these structural peculiarities 

 they agree also with the Finno-Turkic. On the 

 other hand, when we study the vocabularies, we 

 do not find any similarity, such as to suggest 

 a primitive identity, between Japanese, Tungu- 

 sian, and Mongolian proper. We are still fur- 

 ther baffled when we come to Chinese. The 

 people of Japan obtained their written character 

 from China, modifying it to suit the needs of 

 their own language ; and so a Japanese printed 

 page looks very like a printed page in Chinese. 

 If you were just to look at these printed pages, 

 you would imagine that the two languages are 

 very similar, just as a Chinaman, on seeing 

 Hungarian printed in the Roman character, 

 would fancy that Hungarian must be similar 

 to English or Latin. In reality no kinship has 

 yet been detected between the languages of 

 China and Japan. Not only in vocabulary 

 does Chinese differ from all the other lan- 

 guages spoken by the Mongolian race, but it 

 even presents a fundamentally distinct type of 

 linguistic structure. Age after age, from the 

 remotest antiquity to which historic or philo- 

 logic inference can guide us, the Chinese have 

 talked with different words and after a different 

 grammatical fashion from their yellow neigh- 

 bours ; and these in turn have maintained each 

 their distinct varieties of speech ; although all 

 these peoples the inhabitants of Japan and 

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