THE DEVEL0P3IENT OF LAXGUAGE. 97 



of one vowel or diphthong alone, or else of a vowel or diphthong pre- 

 ceded by a single consonant. Every word ended with a vowel, and 

 two consonants never came together. Ail his Avords were thus 

 reduced to a form of the utmost simplicity ; and, of course, the same 

 syllable had many significations. Co signified clothes, coat, cold; 

 cd was cat, cap, candy, scratch ; /, which ha could not manage, became 

 10, and thus "walk" and "fall" were both pronounced waio. R, 

 which he could not j^ronounce, became /, and thus both " ride " and 

 "like" were sounded li. His sister's ])et name, Florrie, became 

 Woy, and Willie was sounded Wee. Yet, with this imperfect speech, 

 the little fellow managed to make his meaning partly intelligible to 

 his mother, and completely so to his brother, older than himself, who 

 readily conversed with him, and became his interpreter to the older 

 members of the family. Here, it will be seen, was already the com- 

 mencement of a new language. What was particularly interesting 

 was the fact that this language took a completely Chinese form. In 

 the proper Chinese language, as is well-known, every word ends in a 

 vowel, either pure or nasalized ; and the great majority of words 

 comprise but a single consonantal sound. Indeed, where in our 

 orthography a Chinese word commences with two consonants, their 

 utterance rej^resents to the native ear a single sound, — this sound 

 being a mute combined with an aspirate or a sibilant, as in kho, tsa. 

 Occasionally both aspirate and sibilant follow the mute, still making 

 with it, according to Chinese notions, a single consonant, as in thso, 

 thseng. These combinations, however, are rare, tha k, j), and t being 

 the only consonants which can be followed by the aspirate or the 

 sibilant, and the t alone being capable of receiving them both at once- 

 The total number of syllables in the Chinese language — that is, of 

 what we should consider words — is only -ioO, which is raised to 1 203 

 by the variation of accents.* 



If we suppose that a new speech had to be framed by an isolated 

 group of young children, in whom the linguistic faculty was naturally 

 weak, and was exceptionally slow in development, we can undei'stand 

 how such a language miglit be arrested in its monosyllabic stage. Its 

 four or five hundred words would be ample as a means of communica. 

 tion among children, and if these words were supplemented, as the 

 speakers grew older, by the variations made by the tonic accents, giv- 



Abel-R'-musat : Graiaiaaire ChinoUe, \^. 33. 



7 



