ON THE CHINESE SYSTEM OF WRITING. 19 



Fo-kien proper, and those of the county of Chang-chow, and the district of 

 Chang-poo, in the same province, with the natives of which they had had 

 much communication in the Chinese colonies in the Indian seas; but they 

 could not be familiar with the dialects of the more northern provinces wlijch 

 they visited; there must, therefore, have been a common medium of oral com- 

 munication between them and the inhabitants. Why, then, was not the writ- 

 ten medium, that universal language, as it is called, made use of, or even at 

 any time or on any occasion called to their aid in those distant places? This, 

 I must confess, shakes my belief in a great degree ; at least as far as respects 

 China itself, where sinologists tell us that even those who can converse toge- 

 ther in the mandarin tongue, even the learned mandarins, are sometimes 

 obliged to trace characters with their fingers in the air, when they cannot 

 make themselves understood by word of mouth. I suspect that there is here 

 a great deal of exaggeration ; no one is better able than your learned corre- 

 spondent to explain it. 



II. Annamitic Languages. 



We are now out of the limits of the Celestial Empire; but we have not yet 

 taken leave of the Chinese race, to which the people of the country I am going 

 to describe appear to me to belong. 



The country called Annam, or Anam, which means *' the country of the 

 south," is situated on a tongue of land at the southern extremity of the China 

 Sea. It is bounded to the north by the Chinese empire, to the east and south 

 by the sea, and to the west by a chain of mountains, which separates it from 

 the kingdom of Siam, and from the countries that are called the Birraan 

 empire. It contains the kingdoms of Tunkin and Cochinchina, to which the 

 name of Annam is more especially applied, and the lesser states of Cambodia, 

 Laos, and Ciampa. Of the languages of the last three we know absolutely 

 nothing; we only presume that they are monosyllabic, like those of Tunkin 

 and Cochinchina. I see, with pleasure, that your correspondent has composed 

 a dictionary of the Cambodian language, which he kindly offers to present to 

 our society, who, I have no doubt, will receive with gratitude that valuable 

 present, and be the first to make known the Cambodian language to America 

 and Europe, as they have done the Cochinchinese. We may hope, hereafter, 

 to become acquainted with the idioms of Laos and Ciampa. There is nothing 



