Thomas Watters

“ It is nature's, not man's doing that the accent and pronunciation of words alter, that one term rises and another falls out of use as generation follows generation. But how is it that not only has the language of China been always unlike the dialects of the barbarian tribes in her midst and on her frontiers, but also that this language itself varies from district to district? The answer is that here too we have the work of nature. ”

“ The power which the human mind has over its instruments, and independent of their imperfections, is strikingly illustrated by the history of this form of speech, which has successfully answered all the purposes of a cultivated, reflecting, studious, and ingenious people, throughout a career of unequalled duration; which has been put to far higher and more varied uses than most of the multitude of highly organised dialects spoken among men—dialects rich in flexibility, adaptiveness and power of expansion, but poor in the mental poverty and weakness of those who should wield them. ”

“ The Chinese do not yield to any in their appreciation of writing and its developments. They long ago deified the inventor, and his supposed tomb is still a place of pilgrimage for enthusiastic scholars. From the practical, beneficial point of view the invention has been the subject of much praise. Let us hear one man, a Manchoo by origin, but a Chinese scholar of rare attainments, and a man of culture and wide sympathies. Writing, says Kanghsi, is the most precious thing in the world. As to great matters, it has transmitted the philosophy which the ancient sages wished to transmit ”

“ But intercourse with foreign nations introduced at least a partial knowledge of other languages, and the Chinese had to compare their own perfectly harmonised speech with the shrike-tongued cries of barbarians, and their own matchless characters with the mere imitations of bird and beast footprints used by the undeveloped savages who had never been blessed with divine philosophers. One of the marks whereby a barbarian is known is that he writes from left to right, another being that he takes his food without using chop-sticks. ”

“ In man, writes a practical statesman, [23] speech is the handle of the moral nature, the lord of action, the motive power of the mind, and the visible expression of the body, and with man alone words are capable of communicating ideas. The object of speech is to give expression to the feelings and thoughts. But that it is not a perfect instrument was long ago seen and acknowledged by the Chinese. Thus we are told that as writing does not fully represent the spoken language so this latter does not fully express the mind. ”

“ Very few, however, have clung to the heresy of the special creation of Chinese, though many have held it to be a language by itself without parent and without offspring. In direct opposition to such opinions is the theory which makes Chinese to have been the primeval tongue, the first language, — that in which Adam and Eve talked with the Lord God and the Serpent and to each other as they walked among the trees in the Garden of Eden — and so the fore-mother of all other languages. ”

“ Metal and stone are mute, but they give sound when struck, and it is the same as to man with speech. When he cannot get his own way he speaks; he sings his anxiety and weeps his sorrow. All the utterances which proceed from his mouth are the result of his being disturbed. Speech is the quintessence of human sounds, and literary composition is the quintessence of speech. [9] It was perhaps from the perception of the emotional nature of early speech that some Chinese writers were led to the theory that their spoken language had its origin in music. ”

“ He took the hints, as it were, and devised a system of writing. This invention was fraught with great consequences, and put the universe in commotion. The heavens rained millet, ghosts wailed by night, and dragons went into hiding. There are also Chinese writers who regard pictorial or symbolical representation as coæval with speech. They think it was quite as natural for man to depict as to talk. This unfortunately reminds one of Dogberry's assertion that "to write and read comes by nature." ”

“ Hence in the language of Fan there is an endless variety of sound; with the Chinese there is an endless variety of the character. In Fan, the principles of sound excite an admiration, but the letters are destitute of beauty; in Chinese, the characters are capable of ever-varying intelligible modifications, but the sounds are not possessed of nice and minute distinctions. The people of Fan prefer the sounds, and what they obtain enters by the ear; the Chinese prefer the beautiful character, what they obtain enters by the eye. ”

“ A featherless biped, as a native writer says, may speak, but without li (禮) he is not man. It is this sense of order and of doing what is right and becoming in the family and in society, and the code of obligations thence resulting, this li which lifts man above the other creatures. [18] Some of these can indeed produce articulate utterances, after having learned them, by imitation, as an infant learns its first words by imitating its mother. But it is human sounds, not human speech, to borrow an expression from Dante, [19] which these creatures imitate, and they are not "capable of language." ”

“ The chief reason, perhaps, why Chinese philosophers have not discussed the origin of speech in special treatises and of set purpose, is that they regard the faculty of speech as the natural result of man's existence, as inherent in his constitution. What may be considered as the orthodox and national opinion on the subject is that man speaks, just as he eats, and drinks, and sleeps, and loves, and fears, from an instinct which forms part of his nature. ”

“ Whatever be the immediate origin of speech, however, it is in its earliest stage natural and spontaneous, the embodiment of the original tones of Heaven and Earth. The first men spoke just as the wind blows, without any conscious effort. The feelings find vent in sounds which spring from man's mind, having their source in his constitution. Articulate utterances come from man's mind, others tell us, and are natural; their form cannot be altered by any conscious exercise of an individual's power. ”

“ With these statements we many compare the emphatic declaration of the great expounder of language as a natural product. Professor Max Müller tells us "that although there is a continuous change in language it is not in the power of any man either to produce or prevent it. We might think as well of changing the laws which control the circulation of our blood, or of adding an inch to our height, as of altering the laws of speech, or inventing new words according to our own pleasure. ”

“ We have among us at present students who are from time to time adding new and interesting facts, which will greatly help the future philosopher to form conclusions wide and general and at the same time accurate. But much still remains to be done before the genius and constitution of the Chinese language are thoroughly understood, and before its rank and value in the world's speech-tribes can be definitely settled. ”

“ The number of human beings who at present speak the Chinese language in one or other of its many varying forms cannot rightly be set down as much less than 400,000,000. For even if we regard the population of China proper, as given by some Western writers, to be greatly overrated, yet when we add to it those of Chinese origin who, living outside of the Eighteen Provinces, still speak a dialect of their native language, we have a sum which is perhaps even above the total just given. ”

“ As Lyell says, "It was a profound saying of William Humboldt, that 'Man is Man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already Man.' Other animals may be able to utter sounds more articulate and as varied as the click of the Bushman, but voice alone can never enable brute intelligence to acquire language." [20] Yet perhaps because the power of speaking is supposed to belong to the Sing-sing and parrot, these animals are also credited with the possession of other extaordinary endowments, for the Sing-sing knows the past and the parrot the future. ”

“ In the history of the world, however, it has not played a great or very conspicuous part, nor has it wrought for mankind the noble works of other nations. But we must also bear in mind that we know the history of the world only as told by Western authors. Still, the language and literature of China can never among people remote from that country arouse any enthusiastic interest such as that with which some of the Semitic and Indo-European languages have been studied by western scholars, especially within a recent period. ”

“ The combination of meaning and sound is not the product of this visible representation. There is no means of investigating the origin of mankind, but we may reasonably infer that men at first were naked and unkempt. They killed wild animals, skinned them and tore up their carcases for food and clothing. Their emotional natures were fierce like those of birds and beasts, and their intellects were undeveloped like those of infants. ”

“ But other native writers tell us that the first sound uttered by a human being is a or ya. Hence the letter called a is said to be rightly placed at the head of Western alphabets, and some even go so far as to declare that in every sound uttered by man's opened mouth there is an a element. It is considered, however, that a sounds are natural to male, and ei or i sounds to female infants, and that the distinction continues in after years. This, according to the Chinese, is the spontaneous result of the human constitution. ”

“ The Chinese language is very rich in these nature-sounds and "vocal-gestures" which abound not only in the common talk of the people but also in the popular literature and in the writings of poets and philosophers. ”

“ On the other hand, however, we find it not seldom stated that the Chinese language is poor in its stock of words, and that as a means of expression it is rude and awkward in management. It has been declared by several of our Western scholars to be specially wanting in terms to express abstract and spiritual ideas, and the requirements of a high civilisation generally. A Jesuit missionary of the last century, who had studied Chinese among the people, writes from Canton that there is not, perhaps, in all the world a language poorer in expressions. ”

“ As we know, the cries and gesticulations of children and animals are the spontaneous expression of their emotions when stirred. From such cries arose rhythmical vocal utterances which afterwards developed into poetry. In general, writes Han Wen-kung, objects produce sound only when disturbed. Plants and trees are mute until they are agitated by the wind, when they yield sound, and so is it with water. ”

“ The Chinese own that these utterances are only cries, and of a class with those of birds and beasts. The infant has no language but a cry, and in this respect it is not better than other animals, perhaps not so well supplied as other creatures. Nor is the capacity for uttering articulate sounds the possession of man alone among mortal beings. The ape-like Sing-sing and several other animals, according to Chinese opinion, are able to talk and understand human speech. ”

“ As man is the lord of nature only if he knows her laws and submits to them, the poet and philosopher become the lords of language only if they know its laws and obey them. [13]
Chinese opinions differ as to what is the first articulate sound made by the human baby. Some tell us that it is huang-huang, but this is only an a priori theory. To each of the five elements a certain sound is assigned. Thus water has a ssŭ sound, and that of metal is huang (鍠) . Now in man's constitution the element metal is represented by his voice, and hence an infant, as soon as it can, cries huang-huang. ”

“ The crow has filial piety and the wild duck is true to its mate; the fox does not forget the place of his birth, and the ant helps all of its kin. But does a crow bury his mother or a fox give way to his elders? Do the wild ducks wait for the go-between before they pair, and have the ants any form of worship? The parrot and the starling may talk but they have no sense of the fitness of time and place, and so are no better than other birds. ”

“ The work is one of great learning and genius, but its theories and criticisms are too subtle and fanciful. Hsü Ch‘ie, it has been said, reverenced the "Shuo-wên" as a canonical book, and no one up to his time equalled him in the zeal and learning devoted to that work. His great treatise, as it has come down to us, has many errors and mistakes, partly due to copyists or printers and partly to the want of revision. A learned and critical examination of it has been made by a late scholar, who has pointed out and corrected the mistakes of Hsü Ch‘ie and his brother. ”

“ One native philosopher describes man as speaking by breathing forth the air contained in the mouth and throat by movements of the lips and tongue. The act of speaking is like playing a flute. Man's mouth and throat are the musical instrument, and the movements of the tongue are the play of the fingers on the holes. The power of speaking grows and fails with the growth and decay of man's vital powers, and these need food and drink for their maintenance. ”

“ For the most part, however, Chinese speak of their characters as sufficient for all the needs of human life and thought, as full and complete, wanting nothing. In their six-fold classification, writes one author, the written characters embrace all the topics with which man can be concerned, the visible phenomena of heaven, the unseen laws of earth, human affairs, and the rules appointed for lower nature. ”

“ Several authors have seen a relationship between the language of China and that of ancient Egypt. The first and greatest advocate of the theory that the original Chinese were a colony from Egypt was De Guignes. He boldly entitled his treatise on the subject, "Memoire dans lequel on prouve que les Chinois sont une Colonie Egyptienne;" but he supported his hypothesis largely with word-resemblances of an artifical character. Scholars and Sinologists have held that Chinese and Hebrew are related, the latter having been regarded by some of them as the parent language of the world. ”