DETAILS RESPECTING COCHIN CHINA* 
i fa 
They pronounced chtt, and which signifies father; but in Chinese flier 
same character cha signifies to put oneself into a passion. On the 
other hand, they have united many characters of which one signifies 
the sense, and the other the pronunciation. Thus they write wJjZL 
mieng, the mouth. The first character ^ ^means the sense, the 
mouth, and the second 
mink indicates the pronunciation 
This manner of writing the vulgar language has no generally adopt¬ 
ed form. Many persons write the same word differently, and 
many characters are purely arbitrary. There are needed to fix the 
orthography of tjjjis vulgar language learned books written in it; 
but these are as yet wanting. There have only been written in 
this language our books of religion; many comedies and some 
poems; the learned men not being fond of reading works writ¬ 
ten in such a patois . They find that this writing does not ex¬ 
press the thoughts clearly. We have adopted a plan of writing this 
language with our European letters, as lias been done for the Malay 
language: we have succeeded in representing the sound of words 
very exactly. This much facilitates our study of the language. This 
language is not confined to the limits of Cochin China and Tong- 
king, but is very commonly spoken and understood in Ciampa, 
Camboj3, at Siam and in Laos. We find the sound of all our 
letters in this language, except the letter Z, and the letter P at the 
commencement of words; but they have the ph and the p final 
as in the word hap . If they have not exactly our letter F, they 
have the ph, which has nearly the same sound. 
In this language, as in all others, they have proper names, and com¬ 
mon names. Often in order to form a substantive lliey add the 
word su, which signifies thing, to the adjective or verb: thus lank 
means good; su lank signifies goodness. The adjective is ordina¬ 
rily put after the substantive: e. g. nha means a house, and tot 
means fine; they thus say nha tot, a fine house. The comparative 
is formed by joining the word hon; thus tot him means better ; for 
the superlative they add lam or rdffk. g. tot lam, rat tot sig¬ 
nify very fine. *” r 
This language has not exactly gender, number or case; they 
can express them, however, by means of some auxiliary words. 
Thus to express the difference of sexes they use for the human 
