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EAST ASIA.
respect they have remained in a stage of development answering amongst the
Aryans and* Semites to the prehistoric epoch. Their dialects contain nothing but a
small number of monosyllabic
roots expressing merely general ideas, and conveying
a definite notion only in the sentence. In virtue of their position alone they
become nouns, adjectives, verbs, or particles, and is grammar thus reduced to a
question of syntax. And, strange to say, of all the dialects, the so-called " Manda-
rin," or Kwan-hoa, current in Peking, is the poorest, containing, according to
"Williams, no more than 460 distinct monosyllables. Those of Shanghai and
Ningpo are not much richer ;
but that of Swatow, in the south-east of Kwangtung,
has 674, and that of Canton as many as 707. But the richest of all is that of
Changchew, near Amoy, whose 846 roots yield, according to Medhurst and Douglas,
as many as 2,500 different sounds, thanks to the variety of its intonations ; for
the poverty of sounds obliges the Chinese, like other peoples of monosyllabic
speech, to vary the sense by means of the tones with which they are uttered.
Hence the vague and undecided character of Chinese pronunciation, which, more-
over, varies immensely from province to province and from city to city.
Thus the
sign rendered into English by the word " child," and found in a vast number of
geographical names, is pronounced fs in the north; tz or dz in Canton; c/>i in
Macao. So also the sign for two is diversely pronounced eul, oli; ul, urli, Hi, fur,
nr/e, ngi, she, zhi, e, and i.
This variety in the pronunciation, combined with the poverty of words, gives
all the more importance to the shing, or tour, which plays a greater part than the
mere phonetic utterance of the sounds. Thus the sign for water may be indif-
ferently pronounced siii, shut, sh'ui, or even chv ui, and will be intelligible to all,
provided it be uttered with its proper ascending tone : uttered with the descending
tone, none will understand it. The number of tones varies considerably, some
dialects containing four, others five, six, or even seven, and that of Fokien possibly
more than twelve,
characteristic of that dialect.
if account 'be taken of all the delicate shades of intonation
Thanks to these intonations, thousands of meanings may be evolved from the
few hundred phonetic roots. Kang-hi's dictionary contains 44,449 signs, each
representing a group of distinct meanings, but a great
number of which will be
pronounced alike. Thus over a hundred and fifty different characters, each denot-
ing a particular series of ideas, are all pronounced i. The philosophic writings
can only be understood by readers with the text before their eyes, and whenever
the conversation rises above the usual current of ideas, recourse must be had to the
pencil to make the subject intelligible. This astonishing poverty of phonetic
sounds is commonly attributed to the premature culture of the people, whose speech
became fixed by the official scribes and academicians at too early a date. The
nation has never since been able to overcome the artificial obstruction thus opposed
to the free evolution of their language.
The Buddhist missionaries often vainly attempted to introduce one or other of
the syllabic alphabets of India, based on the Devanagari. The Christian mission-
aries also have employed the Latin alphabet for prayers and hymns, which the