Chinese

“ There has been too much of a disposition to think of the Chinese as a mass, almost as we would regard immense herds of cattle or shoals of fish. Why not rather think of the Chinese as an individual, as a man of like passions with ourselves? ”

“ The Chinese, contrary to ourselves, look back to the past for inspiration and guidance, and to concern oneself about novelty or change appears to them as savouring strongly of shiftiness and want of tone. ”

“ Contemplative, gentle, and metaphysical in their habit of thought, the Chinese have reflected profoundly and worked out many riddles of the universe in ways peculiarly their own. Realization of the value and need to us of a more definite knowledge of the mental processes of our Oriental brothers, increases wonderfully as one begins to comprehend the richness, depth, and beauty of their thought, ripened as it is by the hidden processes of evolution throughout the ages. ”

“ I have lived and traveled three years in China, and have found that the Chinese influence the foreigners and that the foreigners influence the Chinese, sharpening each other’s wit, and smoothing each other’s kindly humor. ”

“ THE first knowledge which we acquire of the Chinese is derived from our servants. Unconsciously to themselves, and not always to our satisfaction, they are our earliest teachers in the native character, and the lessons thus learned we often find it hard to forget. But in proportion as our experience of the Chinese becomes broad, we discover that the conclusions to which we had been insensibly impelled by our dealings with a very narrow circle of servants are strikingly confirmed by our wider knowledge, for there is a sense in which every Chinese may be said to be an epitome of the whole race. ”

“ It was a source of daily amusement to our conductors, to hear the equivoques we made in attempting to speak their language. A Chinese, when the sense is doubtful, will draw the character, or the root of it, in the air with his finger or fan, by which he makes himself at once understood. ”

“ Chinese may be called the Latin of the Far East. For, just as Rome through her higher civilisation lent thousands of words to the semi-savages hovering along her borders, so China has furnished all the surrounding peoples with their scientific, legal, philosophical and religious terminology. ”

“ If we desire to understand what their peculiar views were, what were the dominant ideas which directed their conduct, and which led them to erect the monuments which are marvels to us, even at the present day, we must go to China.
Let us look for a moment into China at the present day. At first sight, the Chinese strike us as being not only geographically our antipodes, but as being our opposites in every particular—mental, moral, social; in language as in ideas.
The Chinese language is without an alphabet and without a grammar. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And, as it is always found congenial to baseness of heart, the most dastardly cowardice completes the description of that of the Chinese.
Unimproved as their arts is their learning. Though their language consists of few words, it is almost impossible for a stranger to attain the art of speaking it. And what a European learns ere he is seven years old, to read, is the labour of the life of a Chinese. ”

“ The Chinese are, my young friends, a very wonderful people—quite unlike the people in any other part of the world. They are very different in their religion, laws, manners and customs; and were you to go and live in China, you would be puzzled to know what to do, and how to act. ”

“ Why should the Chinese express greatness by the syllable fa, the Aryan by ma, the Semite by ga ? " 4 To all appearance, certainly, the Chinese roots are as artificial as can well be conceived, and their simple and regular structure strongly suggests elaboration for purposes of compact and terse expression. 5 Such expression is a marked trait of the national mind, and its influence is everywhere visible in the history of the language as a whole. There is no reason why words should not share the impulse. Their uniformity is the strongest evidence that they are a product of national art. ”

“ 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. ”

“ in fact the language of a child. Now as a proof of this, we all know how easily European children learn colloquial or spoken Chinese, while learned philogues and sinologues insist in saying that Chinese is so difficult. Chinese, colloquial Chinese, I say again is the language of a child. My first advice therefore to my foreign friends who want to learn Chinese is "Be ye like little children, you will then not only enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but you will also be able to learn Chinese." ”

“ If then, by neglecting to study the language of the Chinese, we are silly enough to place ourselves and concerns so completely in their power, we are highly deserving of the extortions and impositions so loudly complained of. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In almost all Chinese composition, again, measured periods, not unlike blank verse, abound, and are esteemed by the scholar as a capital beauty of the language. Ideas, it may be said, often form the secondary object of consideration, the mode in which they are expressed claiming first attention. Thought also is stereotyped, and all the ideas which the Chinese wish to cherish or indicate are contained, as stated above, in those records which have come down to them from the sages of antiquity. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Leaving out of the question the extreme difficulty of the language, now gradually yielding to methodical and persevering study, the peculiar bent of the Chinese mind, with all its prejudices and superstitions, is quite as much an obstacle in the way of eliciting truth as any offered by the fantastic, but still amenable, varieties of Chinese syntax. ”

“ The Chinese, however, are [254] not quite so much out of order as the Doctor seems to be out of his province in attempting a critique on a language, of which he really possesses a very superficial knowledge. The first character 母 moo is composed of and the second 田 tien of ; the one of four and the other of five lines according to the arrangement of Chinese dictionaries, and their elementary treatises.
Among the roots or primitives that most frequently occur are those expressing the hand, heart, mouth, and the five elements, earth, air, fire, wood, and water. Man is also a very common root. ”

“ In customs the Chinese differ from us as much. In mourning they wear white; a Chinese dinner begins with the dessert and ends with the soup; a scholar, to recite his lessons, turns his back on the teacher. But it is chiefly in the way in which the living and the dead are regarded as forming an indissoluble commonwealth, that the difference of ideas is most pronounced. ”

“ Compare these characteristics with the universal black hair and black eyes of men and women throughout China, exclusive of a rare occasional albino; with the long, flowing, loose robes of officials and of the well-to-do; with their slow and stately walk and their rigid formality of position, either sitting or standing. To the Chinese, their own language seems to be the language of the gods; they know they have possessed it for several thousand years, and they know nothing at all of the barbarian. ”

“ Virtually every adaptation in China must be thought through from the beginning by the Chinese; and even in thinking there are varying styles. Are the Chinese to think after the fashion of the West—scientifically and logically—or are they to think in their accustomed traditional and empirical manner? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Next to a competent knowledge of the Chinese language, large powers of inference are essential to any one who is to deal successfully with the Chinese, and whatever his powers in this direction may be, in many instances he will still go astray, because these powers were not equal to what was required of them. In illustration of this all-pervading phenomenon of Chinese life, let us take as an illustration a case often occurring among those who are the earliest, and often by no means the least important, representatives to us of the whole nation—our servants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That is the reason why even a simple letter in prose written in classical Chinese reads like poetry. In order to understand written Chinese, especially what I call full court dress Chinese, you must have your full nature,—the heart and the head, the soul and the intellect equally developed. ”

“ It has been said that in the present stage of our intercourse with Chinese there are three ways in which we can come to some knowledge of their social life—by the study of their novels, their ballads, and their plays. ”

“ Every Chinese character is an indivisible unit, representing a sound and standing for a root-idea. Being free from inflection or agglutination of any kind, it is incapable of indicating in itself either gender, number or case, voice, mood, tense or person. Of European languages, English stands nearest to Chinese in this respect, whence it follows that the construction of a hybrid jargon like pidgin English presents fewer difficulties than would be the case, for instance, with pidgin German. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Chinese, strange to say, though they early attained to a remarkable degree of civilization, and have preceded the Europeans in many of the most important inventions, have a language which resembles that of children, or deaf and dumb people. ”

“ For the Chinese like to hang their balconies with artistic screens, bedeck them with palms, illuminate them with the gay lanterns of their home. Sometimes a woman of complexion of rather accentuated brunette will hang over the rail with a Chinese—or at least a Chinesque—baby in the parti-colored clothing of its paternal ancestors. ”

“ Spoken as well as written Chinese is, in one sense, a very difficult language. It is difficult, not because it is complex. Many European languages such as Latin and French are difficult because they are complex and have many rules. Chinese is difficult not because it is complex, but because it is deep. It is difficult because it is a language for expressing deep feeling in simple language. That is the secret of the difficulty of the Chinese language. In fact, as I have said else where, Chinese is a language of the heart: a poetical language. ”