REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS 195 



word for the designation of a plant which had been cultivated in their 

 dominion for ages, nor is there any evidence for the silent admission 

 that Greek was ever known or spoken in Fergana at the time of Can 

 K'ien's travels. The influence of Greek in the Iranian domain is 

 -extremely slight : nothing Greek has as yet been found in any ancient 

 manuscripts from Turkistan. In my opinion, there is no connection 

 between p'u-t'ao and SotjOu;, nor between the latter and Iranian 

 budawa" (pp. 225-206). In a note he says, "Only a sinologue could 

 assert that the grape was 'originally introduced from Greece, via. 

 Bactria about 130 B.C.' " quoting from Giles's Dictionary. 



The subject in this volume as stated consists of cultivated plants : 

 -so we have alfalfa, the walnut, the cucumber, the coriander, the Henna, 

 pepper, the nutmeg and many other such. 



Dr. Laufer's linguistic attainments must be high, — it is pentecostal. 

 The ordinary man is appalled. He must be surrounded by encyclo- 

 pedias, and grammars, and even then his industry must be immense. 

 Quotations flow in uninterrupted streams. We thank him for this 

 •collection. 



Dr. Laufer has seen it good to invent another system of phonetics. 

 How could he think of doing such a thing ! Of course it can't be 

 denied that the old style is only conventional, and it is possible that 

 some improvements could be made here and there. But it is at once 

 evident that Dr. Laufer is not the person to undertake this, for in the' 

 examples he has made none. In fact his system almost borders on the 

 absurd. He says "forsooth the backwardness of Chinese research is 

 illustrated by the fact that we slavishly adhere to a clumsy and 

 antiquated system of romanization in which two and even three letters 

 are wasted for the expression of a single sound." A more amazing 

 statement has never been made by a scholar. "My system of trans- 

 literation," he says, "will be easily grasped from the following com- 

 parative table." — Let us take the first item on it. Old style ng 

 is turned into h in "my system." How he can claim that h is phonetic 

 at all is strange. A dot is only a dot after all — and has no phonetic 

 significance. Now ng is a phonetic sound and is in the Alphabet of 

 -some languages. It is a very distinct sound in Chinese. One really 

 wonders whether Dr. Laufer is capable of dealing with the sounds of 

 Chinese, evidently being ignorant of them. So to eliminate an old 

 alphabetical letter that admirably fills a function in Chinese and replace 

 it by a mongrel is the height of presumption. The same may be said 

 of ch turned into c:sh to s. The old had a significance phonetically, 

 the new has none. And then to do this on the ground of "wasted 

 letters" is still worse. For Dr. Laufer manifestly condemns himself. 



