28 ON THE CHINESE SYSTEM OF WRITING. 



The learned language is Chinese, but differently pronounced than in China, 

 and for the same reason that has already been given for the Japanese. The 

 Coreans want the nasal vowels of the Chinese, and cannot articulate them. 

 They want the consonant f, of which the Chinese make such frequent use, and 

 they have the consonant &, which the Chinese want. They have a multitude 

 of double, successive, and aspirated consonants, very difficult to be pronounced. 

 It is well known that the Chinese cannot articulate two consonants successively, 

 and always interpose a vowel between. Besides, there are the four tones, or 

 accents, by which the Chinese, in speaking, distinguish their homophonous 

 words. These, probably, are not much attended to out of China, or are differ- 

 ently expressed. Though their words are Chinese, their manner of uttering 

 them is so different that the two nations cannot make themselves understood 

 of each other by word of mouth. Their vocal organs seem to be cast in differ- 

 ent moulds. 



There is nothing extraordinary in this. We vary, more or less, in the same 

 manner in our pronunciation of the dead, and even of some living languages. 

 M. Silvestre de Sacy, the author of the best Arabic grammar extant, could not 

 understand Arabs when speaking, nor make himself understood by them. If 

 an ancient Roman were to come again into this world, an Oxonian could 

 hardly understand him, nor make himself understood by him in his own 

 Latin; he would be obliged to take to his pen, or to his tablets, after the man- 

 ner of the Coreans and the Japanese. 



Thus the great miracle, which has exercised the fancy of so many enthu- 

 siasts and produced such strange theories, is naturally explained. This expla- 

 nation is not to be sought in any thing inherent in the Chinese characters, in 

 their external forms or in their greater perspicuity, but in their connexion with 

 the languages for which they were formed, and in their peculiar adaptation to 

 them. This was well understood by your learned correspondent when he 

 inferred from the facts that he stated that all the languages which made use 

 of the Chinese alphabet were formed on the same model, because he knew 

 that those characters could not be applied to languages differently constructed. 

 But in speaking thus generally, he did not advert to the vernacular languages 

 of Japan, the Loo-Choo Islands, and Corea, so different from the Chinese that 

 it was found impossible to apply to them the Chinese system of writing, though 

 it was by the Chinese that they were civilized. Therefore I humbly conceive 



