Chinese language

“ To an European the Chinese language appears to have few elegancies: it wants all the little auxiliaries that add grace and energy to those of Europe. In the Chinese the beauty of an expression depends entirely on the choice of the character, and not on any selection or arrangement of the monosyllabic sounds. ”

“ One of the most interesting facts about the Chinese language is that in it we can see, not only the forms of sentences, but literally the parts of speech growing up, budding forth one from another. Like nature, the Chinese words are alive and plastic, because thing and action are not formally separated. ”

“ CHINESE LITERATURE.
Chinese Language.—From the Persian Gâthâs and Vedic hymns, let us now turn to the prose writings of the Chinese philosophers, plain, grave, and moral in their tone. The language in which their tenets have been preserved differs materially from the musical Sanscrit and its sister Avesta.
Modern Chinese, which has changed but little from the ancient tongue and is the least developed of all existing languages, is monosyllabic; i. e. each syllable conveys a complete idea, all its words are expressed by single separate sounds. ”

“ No one has ever been able to trace any affinity between the Chinese language and that of any other people, ancient or modern. It is absolutely unique. No other nation except the Japanese has ever borrowed from it, or mingled any of its elements with its own. ”

“ 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. ”

“ To the ordinary Chinese scholar, such helps as these are entirely wanting. He owns very few books; for in the country where printing was invented, books are the luxury of the rich.
The standard dictionary of Chinese, is that compiled two centuries ago in the K‘ang Hsi period, and is alleged to contain 44,449 characters, but of these an immense number are obsolete and synonomous, and only serve the purpose of bewildering the student. Within the past two generations the Chinese language has undergone a remarkable development, owing to the contact of China with her neighbours. ”

“ The career of a student is considered to be the most honourable of all, but though chiefly restricted to handwriting, knowledge of characters, composition and national history, the Chinese admit that no man has ever yet thoroughly mastered his own language or even learnt all the characters.
How then about foreigners' knowledge of the language? It is like the nibblings of a mouse at a mountain. ”

“ No other people is richer in ideas than they; but no people would give up their valuable ideas as quickly as they do....
The Chinese language is by all means the counterpart of the alphabetic stock. It lacks most of the virtues that are found in the alphabetic language; but as an embodiment of simple and final truth, it is invulnerable to storm and stress. It has already protected the Chinese civilization for more than forty centuries. ”

“ They have all proved to be unsatisfactory so far, because the character of the Chinese language, as it is at this moment, is unsuited to an alphabetical script. They would also destroy China's cultural unity: there are many dialects in China that differ so greatly from each other that, for instance, a man from Canton cannot understand a man from Shanghai. If Chinese were written with letters, the result would be a Canton literature and another literature confined to Shanghai, and China would break up into a number of areas with different languages. ”

“ The delay thus caused was well utilized in familiarizing ourselves as much as possible with the language and characteristics of the Chinese, for, as we were without guides, interpreters, or servants, and in some places lacked even official assistance, no travelers, perhaps, were ever more dependent upon the people than ourselves. The Chinese language, the most primitive in the world, is, for this very reason perhaps, the hardest to learn. ”

“ Chinese Tones. The greatest obstacle to the acquisition of the spoken dialects or languages of China, is peculiar application of the tones, which distinguish words having otherwise the same orthography. It is believed that the tones are not in themselves very difficult, but as they are absolutely essential to the spoken language, and require constant attention to nice distinctions, which are never noticed in other languages, they demand all the attention the student can bestow, to remember always the proper tone of each word, and to enunciate it correctly in speaking. ”

“ But the Chinese are not only living under one form of despotic rule, they possess, likewise, one universal language and literature. It is a remarkable fact, that notwithstanding the spoken dialects of each province and county vary so materially, that the Chinese of different districts are absolutely unintelligible to each other; yet, the written medium of the whole empire is easily understood by all, and writing instead of speaking, constitutes the universal method of exchanging ideas. ”

“ It is well known that the Chinese language, which is merely a collection of radical words destitute of grammatical forms, can express even philosophical ideas with tolerable precision; and the English, which, from the mode of its formation by a mixture of different tongues, has been stripped of its grammatical inflections more completely than any other European language, seems nevertheless, even to a foreigner, to be distinguished by its energetic eloquence. ”

“ The Chinese must always remain a stumbling-block in the way of all theories respecting a primitive language. Radical as is the dissimilarity between Arian and Semitic languages, and wide as is the abyss between their grammatical systems, yet they almost appear like sisters when compared with the Chinese, which has nothing like the organic principle of grammar at all. ”

“ 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 Chinese themselves, with that love for historical research and record and the explanation of subsisting institutions which has always distinguished them, have set down for our benefit all the steps of the process by which their immense and unique system of signs has been elaborated out of its scanty beginnings; and both product and process present more numerous and striking analogies with spoken language and its growth than are to be found anywhere else in the whole history of written characters. ”

“ The products of the minds of those thus educated are redolent of the processes through which they have passed. The Chinese language itself is essentially antediluvian, and to overtake it requires the lifetime of a Methusaleh. ”

“ There is a greater difference between the written and the spoken language of China than there is between the written and spoken English language. The Chinese written language is stilted and full of conventional forms. It is understood throughout the whole empire, but differently pronounced in different provinces and localities. The spoken language is cut up into endless dialects and in certain provinces like Fuhkien, Anhui and Kiangsu, the people are as foreigners to each other in the matter of dialects. Such are the peculiar characteristics of the ideographic and spoken languages of China. ”

“ The Chinese written language, without affecting at all the grammatical structure of the native language, has been a vast treasury from which to draw and enrich it with words in every branch of knowledge. Perhaps the great advantage of having such materials at hand from which to form new combinations was never more apparent than at the present time, when the study of western science and institutions, necessitating a new and copious nomenclature and technology, has been entered upon with such avidity. The Chinese ideographs have been found equal to the need. ”

“ The above are only two metres out of many, but enough perhaps to give to any one who will read them with a pause or quasi-caesura, as marked by ° in each specimen, a fair idea of the rhythmic lilt of Chinese poetry. To the trained ear, the effect is most pleasing; and when this scansion, so to speak, is united with rhyme and choice diction, the result is a vehicle for verse, artificial no doubt, and elaborate, but admirably adapted to the genius of the Chinese language. ”

“ A character uniting a happy association of ideas has the same effect upon the eye of the Chinese, as a general theorem expressed in symbols has on a mathematician; but in both cases a man must be learned to feel the beauties of the concise expression. Even in speaking the language has few expletives. "English good, Chinese better,"—"to-day go, to-morrow come,"—"sea no bound, Kiang no bottom;"—"well, not well;"—are modes of expression in which an European will not find much elegance. ”

“ Whether, again, the Chinese vocables have never advanced out of the radical stage at all, or whether they are, rather, products of a development which for some reason was more limited than that of any other known tongue of a highly-endowed race, so that its relics have completely the semblance of roots, is a question of extreme interest as regards the history of that particular language, but of no necessary wider bearing. ”

“ In other words, China has been even more thoroughly isolated linguistically than she has socially, and the evidence goes to prove that at some period enormously remote, after the original Chinese had effected an entrance into the mighty amphitheatre, between the central Asian mountains on the one hand and the waters of the Pacific on the other, they were surrounded by a subsequent race who impinged upon them at every point, and conquered them more than once, but who never succeeded in leaving a single trace upon their unique and primitive language. ”

“ Even the gesture-language of deaf-mutes, which has no "grammar," conveys ideas of relation with surprising ease. Speech is everywhere but the instrument of a force beyond itself, and all grammatical forms hasten, as if gifted with insight, to subserve the spiritual demands for communion and growth, of which they are the product.
The Chinese has special auxiliary words that mark its tenses. It distinguishes cases by prepositions, has a full supply of pronouns, three ways of denoting numerals, and a special sign for the plural, as well as the device of doub- ling words for the same purpose. ”

“ But what hindered the general adoption of these, and what stands in the way of any phonetic system of Chinese writing to-day, is this, that while the literary script and phraseology is the same from one end of China to the other, the spoken language of the common people, both in pronunciation and in its familiar idioms, varies so widely that men from one province may be incomprehensible to men from another. ”

“ As to the origin of the written language of China, invention is altogether out of the question. It seems probable that in prehistoric ages, the Chinese, like other peoples, began to make rude pictures of the sun, moon, and stars, of man himself, of trees, of fire, of rain, and they appear to have followed these up by ideograms of various kinds. ”

“ I have often been asked if Chinese is, or is not, a difficult language to learn. To this question it is quite impossible to give a categorical answer, for the simple reason that Chinese consists of at least two languages, one colloquial and the other written, which for all practical purposes are about as distinct as they well could be.
Colloquial Chinese is a comparatively easy matter. It is, in fact, more easily acquired in the early stages than colloquial French or German. A student will begin to speak from the very first, for the simple reason that there is no other way. ”

“ Its dialects have a range, in the variety of their forms and in the length of the period of development covered by them, which is sought elsewhere in vain. They illustrate the processes of linguistic growth upon an unrivalled scale, and from a primitive era to which we can make but an imperfect approach among the other languages of mankind. Portions of the Chinese literature, it is true, are nearly or quite as old as anything Indo-European, and the Chinese language, as will be shown later, is in some respects more primitive in its structure than any other human tongue ”

“ Excellence in composition, therefore, consists in arranging anew orthodox phrases which are to be found in the ancient classics or in the formidable list of historical or poetical works that the scholar delights to study. Each branch, moreover, of Chinese literature possesses a peculiar style of its own. Any one who could read official Chinese, of which the Peking Gazette may be taken as a typical exemplar, would not necessarily be able to understand an historical work, while books on philosophy, on Buddhism or on Taoism would be almost unintelligible without a special study of their style. ”

“ But, aside from this, almost every department of mental productiveness is represented in China by hosts of works, ancient and modern: in history, in biography, in geography and ethnology, in jurisprudence, in the grammar and lexicography especially of their own tongue, in natural history and science, in art and industry, in the various branches of belles-lettres, as poetry, romance, the drama, the Chinese have produced in abundance what, tried even by our own standard, is worthy of high respect and admiration. ”