ON THE CHINESE SYSTEM OF WRITING. 23 



suit the language to which it was to be applied. The inventors never thought 

 of representing ideas any farther than was necessary to recall to the memory a 

 particular word by a short explanation of its meaning, in which they have not 

 always been very successful. 



In process of time they have methodized the system by classing their words 

 under a certain number of keys, or radicals, which, while they facilitate the 

 understanding of the words placed under them, afford to the student an easy 

 way of finding them in the dictionaries. 



The Chinese system, therefore, may be considered as an ingenious invention, 

 as applied to monosyllabic languages; and it is, perhaps, the only system suited 

 to them; but, abstractedly spealdng, it does not appear to me to be more inge- 

 nious than that of syllabic and elementary alphabets, which are also suited to 

 the languages for which they were made. 



What has contributed most to the admiration which the Chinese system of 

 writing every where commands, is the facility with which nations who cannot 

 speak or understand each others' oral language communicate with each other 

 by means of the Chinese written characters. Hence it has been supposed, and 

 it has become almost the general belief, that those characters represent ideas 

 entirely abstracted from speech. Your learned correspondent, with better 

 judgment, has attributed that facility, as far as it extends, to the similarity of 

 the grammatical structure of the languages of the various nations who thus 

 communicate. As far as it regards the monosyllabic languages, like those I 

 am now speaking of, I agree with him so far, that this similarity in the structure 

 of those languages contributes much to the facility to which he adverts, but 

 I am far from thinking that it is its only cause. I must explain myself a little 

 farther. 



It being admitted that the Chinese and Annamitic lansruaores, thoug^h differ- 

 ing in the sounds of their words, do not differ materially in their structure and 

 grammatical forms; that every Chinese word (with, perhaps, a few exceptions) 

 has a corresponding word in the Tunkinese and Cochinchinese which has 

 precisely the same meaning, and that they use, in writing, the same characters, 

 though their forms and their application to the words of the language have 

 much varied in the course of a long series of ages, it naturally follows that, as 

 far as those forms have not materially varied, and are still applied to the corre- 

 sponding words in the two languages, the Chinese and Cochinchinese may com- 



