Oriental languages

“ The acquisition of any one of that great family of languages, all derived, more or less remotely, from the Latin, which extends over the whole south and west of Europe, cannot fail to cast a strong light upon the other cognate dialects; as the knowledge of any one of the Oriental tongues facilitates, nay almost confers, a mastery over the thousand others, which are less languages of distinct type than dialects of the same speech, offshoots from the same stock. ”

“ Hence you can easily see how much more difficult it is for an Oriental to learn any European language, than a European to learn a second European language. Even amongst the European languages, there are, as you know, many idioms differing one from the other, and consequently difficult to understand. ”

“ The negroes speak their own languages in their own countries; they speak Arabic in North Africa; they learn to speak English, French, and Spanish in America, and Oriental languages when they go to the East. ”

“ The great Northern area is in Russia conterminous with the Western, which means, roughly speaking, Northern Asia with a large part of Europe; the chief displacements having been effected by the great spread of the Turk language. (3) The South-Eastern area begins with the North frontier of China, and includes Thibet, Nipal, the Transgangetic peninsula, Assam, Siam, Pegu, Cambogia, Cochin-China, and China. (4) The South-Western area contains India, Persia, and the Caucasus; here the displacing languages are Indian, Persian, and Arabic, which last is treated as African. ”

“ Throughout Eastern Asia there is still, no doubt, a vast wilderness of languages, but over them all rides the Chinese writing. And very strong—strong enough to be gravely considered—is the possibility of that writing taking up an orthodox association of sounds, and becoming a world speech. ”

“ On this subject, his range of enquiry was as wide as it was persevering. I finally left the Far East in 1855, before he had entered into the midst of his labours in this direction: yet I had had fair opportunity of seeing his close application to the science of language. All languages were equally attacked by him European, Asian, African, American, and Polynesian—in their glossarial, phonetic and idiomatic phases, and particularly the latter. ”

“ Since the literature of Asia was so much neglected, and the causes of that neglect were so various, we could not have expected that any slight power would rouse the nations of Europe from their inattention to it : and they would, perhaps, have persisted in despising it, if they had not been animated by the most powerful incentive that can influence the mind of man : interest was the magic wand which brought them all within one circle : interest was the charm which gave the languages of the East a real and solid importance. ”

“ To judge the East aright, we must know not only what she is, but also how she has become what she is; know, in short, some of the principal phases of her spiritual history as they are reflected in her ancient literature, especially that of India. To interpret to the West the thought of the East, to bring her best and noblest achievements to bear upon our life,—that is today the problem of Oriental philology. ”

“ An Occidental entering the Orient is well-nigh overwhelmed with amusement and surprise at the antipodal characteristics of the two civilizations. Every visible expression of Oriental civilization, every mode of thought, art, architecture; conceptions of God, man, and nature; pronunciation and structure of the language—all seem utterly different from their corresponding elements in the West. Furthermore, as he visits one Oriental country after another, although he discovers differences between Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, and Hindus, yet he is impressed with a strange, a baffling similarity. ”

“ The languages of Asia will now, perhaps, be studied with uncommon ardour ; they are known to be useful, and will soon be found instructive and entertaining : the valuable manuscripts that enrich our public libraries will be in a few years elegantly printed; the manners and sentiments of the Eastern nations will be perfectly known ; and the limits of our knowledge will be no less extended than the bounds of our empire. ”

“ It is generally believed that the system of tones was invented to compensate for the paucity of syllables, or single words, in the spoken languages, or dialects, of the numerous kingdoms of Eastern Asia, which have long since been consolidated into the one vast empire of China. ”

“ Within the last few years we have more or less facilitated the acquisition, and rifled the literature of between thirty and forty eastern dialects—a labour of which any nation might be proud. Our industry, too, is apparently still unabated. Societies for the translation and publication of new works, Oriental libraries, and, perhaps, the most useful step of all, the lithographic process, which has lately supplanted the old and unseemly moveable types, are fast preparing a royal road for the Oriental learner. ”

“ The growth of the European verb tree may be illustrated from Japanese and kindred languages. The European languages are the most perfect and finished in the world. Rudimentary forms are therefore more lost to view in Latin and Greek Grammar than in the more primitive speech of Eastern Asia where the verb is in a sort of chrysalis condition. ”

“ A word here as to that phrase 'Altaic mind.' What business has one to class the Chinese and Japanese together, and to speak of them (as I shall) as 'Altaic'—the Altaic Race? In the first place this term, like 'Latin' or 'Anglo-Saxon,' has the virtue of being quite meaningless. It is utterly silly and inappropriate from every standpoint; but as I need a term to include China and all the peoples that have derived their historic culture from her, I shall beg leave to use it. Neither Japanese nor Corean belong to the billiard-ball group of languages. ”

“ The Oriental bows low, utters conventional "aisatsu" salutations, listens respectfully, withholds his own opinion, agrees with his vis-à-vis, weighs every word uttered with a view to inferring the real meaning, for the genius of the language requires him to assume that the real meaning is not on the surface, and chooses his own language with the same circumspection. ”

“ But it is as an Orientalist that he is chiefly remarkable. He was appointed to the chair of Arabic in the College Royal, and also to the office of Oriental interpreter in the Bibliothèque du Roi; and soon established such a reputation as an Orientalist, that he [54] was consulted on philological questions by the learned of every country in Europe. He was thoroughly master of Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian, and was one of the first French scholars who, without having visited China, [111] attained to any notable proficiency in Chinese. ”

“ If we consider how different the trend of native thought really is from our own, we shall have to confess that few, if any, European scholars have ever mastered any Oriental language to the same extent as the writer of this letter has mastered English, or have adapted their thoughts so cleverly to English models as this old Râjah. ”

“ This makes Asia and Europe the only region in which the whole (or nearly the whole) history of Language can be studied. Besides this, in Europe and Asia we have a history. We can see how languages like the English and Russian are extending themselves; how the German has extended itself; how the Latin had previously extended itself. We can see how languages like the Keltic, the Lithuanic, and the Fin recede. (1) The Western division is the one with which we are most familiar; it includes Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Valley of the Danube, and Greece ”

“ Of late, a number of European and American scholars have begun to study Oriental civilization and they realize that, while materially the Orient is far behind the Occident, morally the Orient is superior to the Occident. ”

“ There 16are branches of knowledge and art in which the East is deficient, and which she must learn from foreign sources. But there are other things all her own, and even your enlightened countrymen may turn with pleasure and profit to a leaf or two out of the books of the East to learn something new, to get a glimpse of vistas of thought with which they are not familiar. And you, Sir, have done not a little to open out before the world treasures of Oriental wisdom which only the diligence of scholars like you could unfold. ”

“ In this work I have carefully avoided Oriental style, language or customs for two reasons: First, there is not an Oriental scholar now, who could do them justice, Second, one is perfectly safe in bringing any people of any age right down to our times. ”

“ The student from Peru finds Quichua words in every vocabulary he lights upon, whilst the student from Brazil finds Guarani words.
Asian.—Asia and Europe, though different quarters of the globe, form but a single continent, and as such have characteristics of their own. One great class of languages is absolutely common to the two—the great Ugrian or Fin family. We miss, no doubt, in Europe such districts as those of Caucasus, and the parts to the North of the Burmese Empire, where numerous mutually unintelligible languages are pressed together within a small area. ”

“ Beginning with the colloquial, then, and taking a linguistic survey of China, we find not one spoken language but a number of dialects, all clearly of a common stock, yet differing from one another as widely as the various Romance languages in southern Europe—say, French, Italian The dialects. and Spanish. Most of these dialects are found fringing the coast-line of China, and penetrating but a comparatively short way into the interior. ”

“ The inference from the vast series of philological facts, of which the following is a specimen, has, generally—perhaps universally—been as follows, viz., that the Lithuanic, Slavonic, and the allied languages of Germany, Italy, and Greece—numerous, widely-spread, and unequivocally European—are Asiatic in origin; the Sanskrit being first referred to Asia, and then assumed to represent the languages of that Asiatic locality. ”

“ He learned Chinese not long ago; and is constantly visiting the Propaganda for practice in conversation with its pupils of all sorts of races. I asked him to give me a list of all the languages and dialects in which he was able to express himself, and he sent me the name of God written in his own hand, in fifty-six languages, of which thirty were European, not counting their subdivision of dialects, seventeen Asiatic, also without reckoning dialects, five African, and four American. ”

“ The three fundamental forms of human language are found in the same countries and under similar relations. In the centre, and south-east of our area, the monosyllabic languages are represented by those of China, Cochinchina, Siam and Thibet. As agglutinative languages, we find in the north-east and north-west the group of Ougro-Japanese, in the south that of the Dravidian and Malay, and in the west the Turkish languages. Lastly, Sanscrit with its derivatives, and the Iranian languages represent in the south and south-west the inflectional languages. ”

“ But an Oriental has usually a good reason at the back of his mind for everything that he does; if only the Western can have the patience to find it, and to remember that European lines are not the only ones on which the human intellect can work. ”

“ Chinese is to Japanese what Latin and Greek are to modern European languages. The fact that a term is of Chinese origin proves nothing as to the nature of the modern Japanese mind. The developing Japanese civilization demanded new terms for her new instruments and increasing concepts. ”

“ This language is perhaps the most difficult of all spoken languages for an Occidental to acquire. It is so thoroughly unlike any of the European languages that the student must change his view-point and learn to look at things as the Japanese do before he can make much progress. To master it one must study both Japanese and Chinese. While a fair linguist can, by hard work, preach with comparative intelligibility after three years of study, a complete mastery of the language is the work of a lifetime. ”

“ In short, the discovery which the Oriental believed himself to have made was this—that neither the Great Man before him, nor the millions whom he led, had the faintest conception of the Meaning of Life ”

“ The proportion of those speaking a certain language is no less impracticable a basis for the choice of an international auxiliary medium. Leaving out the question of Asiatic tongues, in spite of their superiority in this regard, the selection is among those same reciprocally jealous nations, namely, Russian, French, English and German. ”

“ In China, amongst a great variety of mutually unintelligible languages and dialects, the ideographic characters, which are really conventionalized pictures, and independent of oral equivalents, supply to a great extent the place both of gesture and spoken language. The Red Indian world, as we have seen, is a Babel of disconnected languages, but the old sign-language is the same, and the picture-language of one tribe is generally intelligible to another. ”

“ Greek or Christian in the primitive stage, the Asiatic movement clung to the heights longer, sank more gradually, and never sank so low. These facts are painful, but patent; they require explanation.
Why is Oriental art generally superior to European? Bearing in mind what has been said about the nature of the greatest art, we shall expect it to be because in the East they have kept in closer touch with reality. That is precisely what has happened. The emotional life has never been in the East what it has become in the West, the rare possession of a fortunate few. ”