PIDGIN ENGLISH. 169 



on the lips of a Chinaman utterly ignorant of English 

 does sound something like "pidgin." But I must confess 

 that this seems to me a rather far fetched origin though 

 I cannot suggest anything better : nor, so far as I am aware, 

 can any one else. 



As regards the formation of this queer dialect we find less 

 difficulty in arriving at a conclusion. 



Of the natural tendency of language to assimilate words 

 from sources foreign to its own origin we have numerous 

 examples in everyday life. Hindostanee words have become 

 a part and parcel of the English spoken in Great Britain, 

 while numerous Spanish expressions are current in the United 

 States. Spanish itself, again, has in Uruguay and Paraguay 

 admitted a large admixture of Guarani, and the conservative 

 Chinese have with equal facility adopted many words from 

 Manchu and Mongolian. In all these cases the intruding 

 vocables have at first passed as " slang " until custom has 

 stamped them with the mint-mark of respectability. No 

 visible effect is produced upon the languages in question by 

 the presence of these strangers. Yet dialects are to be found 

 which, beginning under similar circumstances, have so lost 

 their original indentity in the process as to haA r e become 

 veritable philological " bastards." Such are the lingua franca 

 of the Mediterranean, and the gitano or gypsey language of 

 that vast tribe, of Hindoo origin, which still exists in every Eu- 

 ropean country, its members, like Ishmael of old. having ''their 

 hand against every man, and everv man's hand against 

 them." The most recent of these bastard dialects, and 

 necessarily less perfect in its individuality than those above- 

 mentioned, is the Pidgin English under notice, which at 

 the present day is spoken by some hundreds of thousands of 

 Chinese upon the seaboard of their empire, and even threat- 

 ens to extend to the coasts of Japan. 



There was also, singularly enough, a native Chinese dialect 

 in process of formation, which was to the colloquial of the 

 district in which it existed what "pidgin" is to pure English. 

 One effect of the Taiping rebellion, which caused an influx 

 of natives from the districts of Central China to Shanghai, 

 was to cause the formation of a fused dialect, consisting of 

 words indifferently taken from those spoken at Shanghai, 

 Canton, and Nanking. 'No great growth of this speech 

 has been noticeable since the rebellion was crushed; but it 

 bade fair at one time to contribute another to the already 

 numerous varieties spoken in different parts of the empire. 



