94 ON THE AMOY COLLOatflAL DIALECT. 



Nouns do not change their forms, to express number or case. There 

 is a genitive particle " e " which follows nouns and pronouns. Thus 

 " gua," " I," " gua e," " my ;" " i," " he," " i e," " his ;" " Ian e," 

 " our," " lin e," " your." 



The pronoun " 11," " thou," has a true plural, " lin," the only in- 

 stance probably in the language. 



The adjective usually precedes the noun with which it is con- 

 nected. When it follows the noun it becomes the predicate of a 

 proposition, the substantive verb being omitted. Thus, " ho lang " 

 means "good man;" "lang hd " means "man is good," "Gau 

 lang," "wise man ;" "lang gau," "man is wise." 



The comparative degree is indicated by prefixing " khah ;" thus, 

 " ho," good ; " khah ho " " better." The superlative is expressed by 

 using particles meaning "very," " extremely." 



There are, of course, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and inter- 

 jections ; these need no special notice. 



On the Rotnan Orthography of the Amoy Colloquial. 



The efforts of Sir William Jones to introduce a uniform mode of 

 expressing, by means of Roman characters, the various sounds of 

 Oriental languages, were much approved by European scholars. It 

 seems to the literary world most desirable to have a single mode of 

 writing ten, twenty, or even fifty different languages. But the fact is, 

 either that the letters fail to designate the sounds with sufficient 

 accuracy, or they become so burdened with diacritical marks, that the 

 simplicity of the plan is lost. Besides, these diacritical marks are so 

 tedious to the writer, so appalling to the printer, and so vexatious to 

 the reader, that the utility of the entire plan is very questionable. To 

 a resident of Amoy, it is important that the expression of the sounds 

 of the Colloquial in the Roman character should be as phonetic and 

 as simple as possible. And when it is considered that the great 

 object in reducing it to a written form is, that it may be used by the 

 masses of the people who know nothing of the Chinese written lan- 

 guage, simplicity and phonetic efficiency are seen to be invaluable. It 

 is hard that the letter " U " should be burdened with a diacritical 

 mark likely to puzzle a Tsiuen Chau villager, merely because the 

 unmarked letter has been already employed to express a different sound 

 on the banks of the Indus. The interests of millions in China should 

 not thus be sacrificed to the convenience of universal philologists. 



But a special reason exists for being chary of diacritical marks for 



