CHINA AND THE CHINESE
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE
If the Chinese people were to file one by one past a given point,
the interesting procession would never come to an end. Before the last
man of those living to-day had gone by, another and a new generation
would have grown up, and so on for ever and ever.
The importance, as a factor in the sum of human affairs, of this
vast nation,—of its language, of its literature, of its religions, of
its history, of its manners and customs,—goes therefore without
saying. Yet a serious attention to China and her affairs is of very
recent growth. Twenty-five years ago there was but one professor of
Chinese in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; and even
that one spent his time more in adorning his profession than in
imparting his knowledge to classes of eager students. Now there are all
together five chairs of Chinese, the occupants of which are all more or
less actively employed. But we are still sadly lacking in what Columbia
University appears to have obtained by the stroke of a generous
pen,—adequate funds for endowment. Meanwhile, I venture to offer my
respectful congratulations to Columbia University on having surmounted
this initial difficulty, and also to prophesy that the foresight of the
liberal donor will be amply justified before many years are over.
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. There are no Declensions or
Conjugations to be learned, and consequently no Paradigms or Irregular
Verbs.
In a day or two the student should be able to say a few simple
things. After three months he should be able to deal with his ordinary
requirements; and after six months he should be able to chatter away
more or less accurately on a variety of interesting subjects. A great
deal depends upon the method by which he is taught.
The written or book language, on the other hand, may fairly be
regarded as a sufficient study for a lifetime; not because of the
peculiar script, which yields when systematically attacked, but because
the style of the book language is often so extremely terse as to make
it obscure, and sometimes so lavishly ornate that without wide reading
it is not easy to follow the figurative phraseology, and historical and
mythological allusions, which confront one on every page.
There are plenty of men, and some women, nowadays, who can carry on
a conversation in Chinese with the utmost facility, and even with
grace. Some speak so well as to be practically indistinguishable from
Chinamen.
There are comparatively few men, and I venture to say still fewer,
if any, women, who can read an ordinary Chinese book with ease, or
write an ordinary Chinese letter at all.
Speaking of women as students of Chinese, there have been so far
only two who have really placed themselves in the front rank. It gives
me great pleasure to add that both these ladies, lady missionaries,
were natives of America, and that it was my privilege while in China to
know them both. In my early studies of Chinese I received much advice
and assistance from one of them, the late Miss Lydia Fay. Later on, I
came to entertain a high respect for the scholarship and literary
attainments of Miss Adele M. Fielde, a well-known authoress.
Before starting upon a course of colloquial Chinese, it is necessary
for the student to consider in what part of China he proposes to put
his knowledge into practice. If he intends to settle or do business in
Peking, it is absolute waste of time for him to learn the dialect of
Shanghai. Theoretically, there is but one language spoken by the
Chinese people in China proper,—over an area of some two million
square miles, say twenty-five times the area of England and Scotland
together. Practically, there are about eight well-marked dialects, all
clearly of a common stock, but so distinct as to constitute eight
different languages, any two of which are quite as unlike as English
and Dutch.
These dialects may be said to fringe the coast line of the Empire of
China. Starting from Canton and coasting northward, before we have left
behind us the province in which Canton is situated, Kuangtung, we reach
Swatow, where a totally new dialect is spoken. A short run now brings
us to Amoy, the dialect of which, though somewhat resembling that of
Swatow, is still very different in many respects. Our next stage is
Foochow, which is in the same province as Amoy, but possesses a special
dialect of its own. Then on to Wenchow, with another dialect, and so on
to Ningpo with yet another, widely spoken also in Shanghai, though the
latter place really has a patois of its own.
Farther north to Chefoo, and thence to Peking, we come at last into
the range of the great dialect, popularly known as Mandarin, which
sweeps round behind the narrow strip of coast occupied by the various
dialects above mentioned, and dominates a hinterland constituting about
four-fifths of China proper. It is obvious, then, that for a person who
settles in a coast district, the dialect of that district must be his
chief care, while for the traveller and explorer Mandarin will probably
stand him in best stead.
The dialect of Peking is now regarded as standard “Mandarin”; but
previous to the year 1425 the capital was at Nanking, and the dialect
of Nanking was the Mandarin then in vogue. Consequently, Pekingese is
the language which all Chinese officials are now bound to speak.
Those who come from certain parts of the vast hinterland speak
Mandarin almost as a mother tongue, while those from the seaboard and
certain adjacent parts of the interior have nearly as much difficulty
in acquiring it, and quite as much difficulty in speaking it with a
correct accent, as the average foreigner.
The importance of Mandarin, the “official language” as the Chinese
call it, is beyond question. It is the vehicle of oral communication
between all Chinese officials, even in cases where they come from the
same part of the country and speak the same patois, between
officials and their servants, between judge and prisoner. Thus, in
every court of justice throughout the Empire the proceedings are
carried on in Mandarin, although none of the parties to the case may
understand a single word. The prosecutor, on his knees, tells his story
in his native dialect. This story is rendered into Mandarin by an
official interpreter for the benefit of the magistrate; the magistrate
asks his questions or makes his remarks in Mandarin, and these are
translated into the local dialect for the benefit of the litigants.
Even if the magistrate knows the dialect himself,—as is often the
case, although no magistrate may hold office in his own
province,—still it is not strictly permissible for him to make use of
the local dialect for magisterial purposes.
It may be added that in all large centres, such as Canton, Foochow,
and Amoy, there will be found, among the well-to-do tradesmen and
merchants, many who can make themselves intelligible in something which
approximates to the dialect of Peking, not to mention that two out of
the above three cities are garrisoned by Manchu troops, who of course
speak that dialect as their native tongue.
Such is Mandarin. It may be compared to a limited extent with Urdu,
the camp language of India. It is obviously the form of colloquial
which should be studied by all, except those who have special interests
in special districts, in which case, of course, the patois of
the locality comes to the front.
We will now suppose that the student has made up his mind to learn
Mandarin. The most natural thing for him, then, to do will be to look
around him for a grammar. He may have trouble in finding one. Such
works do actually exist, and they have been, for the most part, to
quote a familiar trade-mark, “made in Germany.” They are certainly not
made by the Chinese, who do not possess, and never have possessed, in
their language, an equivalent term for grammar. The language is quite
beyond reach of the application of such rules as have been successfully
deduced from Latin and Greek.
The Chinese seem always to have spoken in monosyllables, and these
monosyllables seem always to have been incapable of inflection,
agglutination, or change of any kind. They are in reality root-ideas,
and are capable of adapting themselves to their surroundings, and of
playing each one such varied parts as noun, verb (transitive, neuter,
or even causal), adverb, and conjunction.
The word [wo] wo, which for convenience' sake I call “I,”
must be rendered into English by “me” whenever it is the object of some
other word, which, also for convenience' sake, I call a verb. It has
further such extended senses as “egoistic” and “subjective.”
For example: [wo ai ta] wo ai t'a.
The first of these characters, which is really the root-idea of
“self,” stands here for the pronoun of the first person; the last,
which is really the root-idea of “not self,” “other,” stands for the
pronoun of the third person; and the middle character for the root-idea
of “love.”
This might mean in English, “I love him,” or “I love her,” or “I
love it,”—for there is no gender in Chinese, any more than there is
any other indication of grammatical susceptibilities. We can only
decide if “him,” “her,” or “it” is intended by the context, or by the
circumstances of the case.
Now if we were to transpose what I must still call the pronouns,
although they are not pronouns except when we make them so, we should
have—
[ta ai wo] t'a ai wo
“he, she, or it loves me,” the only change which the Chinese
words have undergone being one of position; while in English, in
addition to the inflection of the pronouns, the “love” of the first
person becomes “loves” in the third person.
Again, supposing we wished to write down—
“People love him (or her),”
we should have—
[ren ai ta] jen ai t'a,
in which once more the noticeable feature is that the middle
character, although passing from the singular to the plural number,
suffers no change of any kind whatever.
Further, the character for “man” is in the plural simply because
such a rendering is the only one which the genius of the Chinese
language will here tolerate, helped out by the fact that the word by
itself does not mean “a man,” but rather what we may call the
root-idea of humanity.
Such terms as “a man,” or “six men,” or “some men,” or “many men,”
would be expressed each in its own particular way.
“All men,” for instance, would involve merely the duplication of the
character jen:—
[ren ren ai ta] jen jen ai t'a.
It is the same with tenses in Chinese. They are not brought out by
inflection, but by the use of additional words.
[lai] lai is the root-idea of “coming,” and lends itself as
follows to the exigencies of conjugation:—
Standing alone, it is imperative:—
[lai] Lai! = “come!” “here!”
[wo lai] wo lai = “I come, or am coming.”
[ta lai] t'a lai = “he comes, or is coming.”
And by inserting [bu] pu, a root-idea of negation,—
[ta bu lai] t'a pu lai = “he comes not, or is not
coming.”
To express an interrogative, we say,—
[ta lai bu lai] t'a lai pu lai = “he come no come?” i.e.
“is he
coming?”
submitting the two alternatives for the person addressed to choose
from in reply.
The indefinite past tense is formed by adding the word [liao]
liao or lo “finished”:—
[ta lai liao] t'a lai lo = “he come finish,” = “he has
come.”
This may be turned into the definite past tense by inserting some
indication of time; e.g.
[ta zao shang lai liao] = “he came this morning.”
Here we see that the same words may be indefinite or definite
according to circumstances.
It is perhaps more startling to find that the same words may be both
active and passive.
Thus, [diu] tiu is the root-idea of “loss,” “to lose,” and
[liao] puts it into the past tense.
Now [wo diu liao] means, and can only mean, “I have lost”—something
understood, or to be expressed. Strike out [wo] and substitute [shiu]
“a book.” No Chinaman would think that the new sentence meant “The book
has lost”—something understood, or to be expressed, as for instance
its cover; but he would grasp at once the real sense, “The book is or
has been lost.”
In the case of such, a phrase as “The book has lost” its cover,
quite a different word would be used for “lost.”
We have the same phenomenon in English. In the New York Times
of February 13, I read, “Mr. So-and-so dined,” meaning not that Mr.
So-and-so took his dinner, but had been entertained at dinner by a
party of friends,—a neuter verb transformed into a passive verb by the
logic of circumstances.
By a like process the word [su] ssu “to die” may also mean
“to make to die” = “to kill.”
The word [jin] chin which stands for “gold” as a substantive
may also stand, as in English, for an adjective, and for a verb, “to
gold,” i.e. to regard as gold, to value highly.
There is nothing in Chinese like love, loving, lovely, as noun
substantive, verb, and adverb. The word, written or spoken, remains
invariably, so far as its own economy is concerned, the same. Its
function in a sentence is governed entirely by position and by the
influence of other words upon it, coupled with the inexorable logic of
attendant circumstances.
When a Chinaman comes up to you and says, “You wantchee my, no
wantchee,” he is doing no foolish thing, at any rate from his own point
of view. To save himself the trouble of learning grammatical English,
he is taking the language and divesting it of all troublesome
inflections, until he has at his control a set of root-ideas, with
which he can juggle as in his own tongue. In other words, “you wantchee
my, no wantchee,” is nothing more nor less than literally rendered
Chinese:—
[ni yao wo u yao] ni yao wo, pu yao = do you want me or
not?
In this “pidgin” English he can express himself as in Chinese by
merely changing the positions of the words:—
“He wantchee my.” “My wantchee he.”
“My belong Englishman.”
“That knife belong my.”
Some years back, when I was leaving China for England with young
children, their faithful Chinese nurse kept on repeating to the little
ones the following remarkable sentence, “My too muchey solly you go
steamah; you no solly my.”
All this is very absurd, no doubt; still it is bona fide
Chinese, and illustrates very forcibly how an intelligible language may
be constructed of root-ideas arranged in logical sequence.
If the last word had now been said in reference to colloquial, it
would be as easy for us to learn to speak Chinese as it is for a
Chinaman to learn to speak Pidgin-English. There is, however, a great
obstacle still in the way of the student. The Chinese language is
peculiarly lacking in vocables; that is to say, it possesses very few
sounds for the conveyance of speech. The dialect of Peking is
restricted to four hundred and twenty, and as every word in the
language must fall under one or other of those sounds, it follows that
if there are 42,000 words in the language (and the standard dictionary
contains 44,000), there is an average of 100 words to each sound. Of
course, if any sound had less than 100 words attached to it, some other
sound would have proportionately more. Thus, accepting the average, we
should have 100 things or ideas, all expressed in speech, for instance,
by the one single sound I.
The confusion likely to arise from such conditions needs not to be
enlarged upon; it is at once obvious, and probably gave rise to the
following sapient remark by a globe-trotting author, which I took from
a newspaper in England:—
“In China, the letter I has one hundred and forty-five
different ways of being pronounced, and each pronunciation has a
different meaning.”
It would be difficult to squeeze more misleading nonsense into a
smaller compass. Imagine the agonies of a Chinese infant school,
struggling with the letter I pronounced in 145 different ways,
with a different meaning to each! It will suffice to say, what
everybody here present must know, that Chinese is not in any sense an
alphabetic language, and that consequently there can be no such thing
as “the letter I.”
When closely examined, this great difficulty of many words with but
one common sound melts rapidly away, until there is but a fairly small
residuum with which the student has to contend. The same difficulty
confronts us, to a slighter extent, even in English. If I say, “I met a
bore in Broadway,” I may mean one of several things. I may mean a tidal
wave, which is at once put out of court by the logic of circumstances.
Or I may mean a wild animal, which also has circumstances against it.
To return to Chinese. In the first place, although there are no
doubt 42,000 separate written characters in the Chinese language, about
one-tenth of that number, 4200, would more than suffice for the needs
of an average speaker. Adopting this scale, we have 420 sounds and 4200
words, or ten words to each sound,—still a sufficient hindrance to
anything like certain intelligibility of speech. But this is not the
whole case. The ten characters, for instance, under each sound, are
distributed over four separate groups, formed by certain modulations of
the voice, known as Tones, so that actually there would be only an
average of 21/2 words liable to absolute confusion. Thus [yan1] yen^1
means “smoke”; [yan2] yen^2 means “salt”; [yan3] yen^3 means “an eye”;
and [yan4] yen^4 means “a goose.”
These modulations are not readily distinguished at first; but the
ear is easily trained, and it soon becomes difficult to mistake them.
Nor is this all. The Chinese, although their language is
monosyllabic, do not make an extensive use of monosyllables in speech
to express a single thing or idea. They couple their words in pairs.
Thus, for “eye” they would say, not yen, which strictly means
“hole,” or “socket,” but yen ching, the added word ching,
which means “eyeball,” tying down the term to the application required,
namely, “eye.”
In like manner it is not customary to talk about yen, “salt,”
as we do, but to restrict the term as required in each case by the
addition of some explanatory word; for instance, [bai yan] “white
salt,” i.e. “table salt”; [he yan] “black salt,” i.e.
“coarse salt”; all of which tends very much to prevent confusion with
other words pronounced in the same tone.
There are also certain words used as suffixes, which help to
separate terms which might otherwise be confused. Thus [guo3] kuo_^3
means “to wrap,” and [guo3] kuo_^3 means “fruit,” the two being
identical in sound and tone. And yao kuo might mean either “I
want fruit” or “I want to wrap.” No one, however, says kuo for
“fruit,” but kuo tzu. The suffix tzu renders confusion
impossible.
Of course there is no confusion in reading a book, where each thing
or idea, although of the same sound and tone, is represented by a
different symbol.
On the whole, it may be said that misconceptions in the colloquial
are not altogether due to the fact that the Chinese language is poorly
provided with sounds. Many persons, otherwise gifted, are quite unable
to learn any foreign tongue.
Let us now turn to the machinery by means of which the Chinese
arrest the winged words of speech, and give to mere thought and
utterance a more concrete and a more lasting form.
The written language has one advantage over the colloquial: it is
uniformly the same all over China; and the same document is equally
intelligible to natives of Peking and Canton, just as the Arabic and
Roman numerals are understood all over Europe, although pronounced
differently by various nations.
To this fact some have attributed the stability of the Chinese
Empire and the permanence of her political and social institutions.
If we take the written language of to-day, which is to all intents
and purposes the written language of twenty-five hundred years ago, we
gaze at first on what seems to be a confused mass of separate signs,
each sign being apparently a fortuitous concourse of dots and dashes.
Gradually, however, the eye comes to perceive that every now and again
there is to be found in one character a certain portion which has
already been observed in another, and this may well have given rise to
the idea that each character is built up of parts equivalent to our
letters of the alphabet. These portions are of two kinds, and must be
considered under two separate heads.
Under the first head come a variety of words, which also occur as
substantive characters, such as dog, vegetation, tree, disease, metal,
words, fish, bird, man, woman. These are found to indicate the
direction in which the sense of the whole character is to be sought.
Thus, whenever [CJK:72AD] “dog” occurs in a character, the reader
may prepare for the name of some animal, as for instance [shi] shih
“lion,” [mao] mao “cat,” [lang] lang “wolf", [zhu] ehu
“pig.”
Two of these are interesting words. (1) There are no lions in China;
shih is merely an imitation of the Persian word shir. (2)
Mao, the term for a “cat,” is obviously an example of onomatopoeia.
The character [CJK:72AD] will also indicate in many cases such
attributes as [hua] hua “tricky,” [heng] hen,
“aggressive,” [meng] meng “fierce,” and other characteristics of
animals.
Similarly, [CJK:8279] ts'ao “vegetation” will hint at some
plant; e.g. [tsao] ts'ao “grass,” [he] ho “the
lily,” [zhi] chih “the plant of immortality.”
[mu] mu “a tree” usually points toward some species of tree;
e.g. [song] sung “a fir tree,” [sang] sang “a
mulberry tree”; and by extension it points toward anything of wood, as
[ban] pan “a board,” [zhuo] cho “a table,” [yi] i
“a chair,” and so on.
So [yu] yue “a fish” and [diao] niao “a bird” are
found in all characters of ichthyological or ornithological types,
respectively.
[ren] jen “a man” is found in a large number of characters
dealing with humanity under varied aspects; e.g. [ni] ni
“thou,” [ta] t'a “he,” [zuo] tso “to make,” [zhang]
chang “a weapon,” [jie] chieh “a hero,” [ru] ju “a
scholar,” “a Confucianist”; while it has been pointed out that such
words as [jian] chien “treacherous,” [mei] mei “to
flatter,” and [du] tu “jealousy,” are all written with the
indicator [nu] nue “woman” at the side.
The question now arises how these significant parts got into their
present position. Have they always been there, and was the script
artificially constructed off-hand, as is the case with Mongolian and
Manchu? The answer to this question can hardly be presented in a few
words, but involves the following considerations.
It seems to be quite certain that in very early times, when the
possibility and advantage of committing thought to writing first
suggested themselves to the Chinese mind, rude pictures of things
formed the whole stock in trade. Such were
[Illustration: Sun, moon, mountains, hand, child, wood, bending
official, mouth, ox, and claws.]
in many of which it is not difficult to trace the modern forms of
to-day,
[mi yue shan shiu zi mu chen kou niu zhao]
It may here be noted that there was a tendency to curves so long as
the characters were scratched on bamboo tablets with a metal stylus.
With the invention of paper in the first century A.D., and the
substitution of a hair-pencil for the stylus, verticals and horizontals
came more into vogue.
The second step was the combination of two pictures to make a third;
for instance, a mouth with something coming out of it is “the tongue,”
[gua]; a mouth with something else coming out of it is “speech,”
“words,” [yan]; two trees put side by side make the picture of a
“forest,” [lin].
The next step was to produce pictures of ideas. For instance, there
already existed in speech a word ming, meaning “bright.” To
express this, the Chinese placed in juxtaposition the two brightest
things known to them. Thus [mi] the “sun” and [yue] the “moon” were
combined to form [ming] ming “bright.” There is as yet no
suggestion of phonetic influence. The combined character has a sound
quite different from that of either of its component parts, which are
jih and yueeh respectively.
In like manner, [mi] “sun” and [mu] “tree,” combined as [dong], “the
sun seen rising through trees,” signified “the east”; [yan] “words” and
[gua] “tongue” = [hua] “speech”; [you] (old form [Illustration]) “two
hands” = “friendship”; [nue] “woman” and [zi] “child” = [hao] “good”;
[nue] “woman” and [sheng] “birth,” “born of a woman” = [xing] “clan
name,” showing that the ancient Chinese traced through the mother and
not through the father; [wu] streamers used in signalling a negative =
“do not!”
From [lin] “two trees,” the picture of a forest, we come to [sen]
“three trees,” suggesting the idea of density of growth and darkness;
[xiao] “a child at the feet of an old man” = “filial piety”; [ge] “a
spear” and [shou] “to kill,” suggesting the defensive attitude of
individuals in primeval times = [wo] “I, me”; [wo] “I, my,” and [yang]
“sheep,” suggesting the obligation to respect another man's flocks =
[yi] “duty toward one's neighbour”; [da] “large” and [yang] “sheep” =
[mei] “beautiful”; and [shan], “virtuous,” also has “sheep” as a
component part,—why we do not very satisfactorily make out, except
that of course the sheep would play an important role among early
pastoral tribes. The idea conveyed by what we call the conjunction
“and” is expressed in Chinese by an ideogram, viz. [ji], which was
originally the picture of a hand, seizing what might be the tail of the
coat of a man preceding, scilicet following.
The third and greatest step in the art of writing was reached when
the Chinese, who had been trying to make one character do for several
similar-sounding words of different meanings, suddenly bethought
themselves of distinguishing these several similar-sounding words by
adding to the original character employed some other character
indicative of the special sense in which each was to be understood.
Thus, in speech the sound ting meant “the sting of an insect,”
and was appropriately pictured by what is now written [ding].
There were, however, other words also expressed by the sound ting, such as “a boil,” “the top or tip,” “to command,” “a nail,” “an
ingot,” and “to arrange.” These would be distinguished in speech by the
tones and suffixes, as already described; but in writing, if [ding]
were used for all alike, confusion would of necessity arise. To remedy
this, it occurred to some one in very early ages to make [ding], and
other similar pictures of things or ideas, serve as what we now call
Phonetics, i.e. the part which suggests the sound of the
character, and to add in each case an indicator of the special sense
intended to be conveyed. Thus, taking [ding] as the phonetic base, in
order to express ting, “a boil,” the indicator for “disease,”
[chuang], was added, making [ding]; for ting, “the top,” the
indicator for “head,” [ye], was added, making [ding]; for “to command,”
the symbol for “mouth,” [kou] was added, making [ding]; for “nail,” and
also for “ingot,” the symbol for “metal,” [jin], was added, making
[ding]; and for “to arrange,” the symbol for “speech,” [yan], was
added, making [ding]. We thus obtain five new words, which, so far as
the written language is concerned, are easily distinguishable one from
another, namely, ting “a sting,” disease-ting = “a boil,”
head-ting = “the top,” mouth-ting = “to command,” metal-
ting = “a nail,” speech-ting = “to arrange.” In like manner,
the words for “mouth,” “to rap,” and “a button,” were all pronounced
k'ou. Having got [kou] k'ou as the picture of a mouth, that
was taken as the phonetic base, and to express “to rap,” the symbol for
“hand,” [shou] or [CJK:624C], was added, making [kou]; while to express
“button,” the symbol for “metal,” [jin] was added, making [kou]. So
that we have k'ou = “mouth,” hand-k'ou = “to rap,” and
metal-k'ou = “button.”
Let us take a picture of an idea. We have [dong] tung = the
sun seen through the trees,—“the east.” When the early Chinese wished
to write down tung “to freeze,” they simply took the already
existing [dong] as the phonetic base, and added to it “an icicle,”
[bing], thus [dong]. And when they wanted to write down tung “a
beam,” instead of “icicle,” they put the obvious indicator [mu] “wood,”
thus [dong].
We have now got the two portions into which the vast majority of
Chinese characters can be easily resolved.
There is first the phonetic base, itself a character originally
intended to represent some thing or idea, and then borrowed to
represent other things and ideas similarly pronounced; and secondly,
the indicator, another character added to the phonetic base in order to
distinguish between the various things and ideas for which the same
phonetic base was used.
All characters, however, do not yield at once to the application of
our rule. [yao] yao “to will, to want,” is composed of [xi]
“west” and [nue] “woman.” What has western woman to do with the sign of
the future? In the days before writing, the Chinese called the waist of
the body yao. By and by they wrote [yao], a rude picture of man
with his arms akimbo and his legs crossed, thus accentuating the
narrower portion, the waist. Then, when it was necessary to write down
yao, “to will,” they simply borrowed the already existing word for
“waist.” In later times, when writing became more exact, they took the
indicator [yue] “flesh,” and added it wherever the idea of waist had to
be conveyed. And thus [yao] it is still written, while yao, “to
will, to want,” has usurped the character originally invented for
“waist.”
In some of their own identifications native Chinese scholars have
often shown themselves hopelessly at sea. For instance, [tian] “the
sky,” figuratively God, was explained by the first Chinese
lexicographer, whose work has come down to us from about one hundred
years after the Christian era, as composed of [yi] “one” and [da]
“great,” the “one great” thing; whereas it was simply, under its oldest
form, [Illustration], a rude anthropomorphic picture of the Deity.
Even the early Jesuit Fathers of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, to whom we owe so much for pioneer work in the domain of
Sinology, were not without occasional lapses of the kind, due no doubt
to a laudable if excessive zeal. Finding the character [chuan], which
is the common word for “a ship,” as indicated by [zhou], the earlier
picture-character for “boat” seen on the left-hand side, one ingenious
Father proceeded to analyse it as follows:—
[zhou] “ship,” [ba] “eight,” [kou] “mouth” = eight mouths on a
ship—“the Ark.”
But the right-hand portion is merely the phonetic of the character;
it was originally [qian] “lead,” which gave the sound required; then
the indicator “boat” was substituted for “metal.”
So with the word [jin] “to prohibit.” Because it could be analysed
into two [mu][mu] “trees” and [qi] “a divine proclamation,” an allusion
was discovered therein to the two trees and the proclamation of the
Garden of Eden; whereas again the proper analysis is into indicator and
phonetic.
Nor is such misplaced ingenuity confined to the Roman Catholic
Church. In 1892 a Protestant missionary published and circulated
broadcast what he said was “evidence in favour of the Gospels,” being
nothing less than a prophecy of Christ's coming hidden in the Chinese
character [lai] “to come.” He pointed out that this was composed of
[Illustration] “a cross,” with two [ren][ren] “men,” one on each side,
and a “greater man” [ren] in the middle.
That analysis is all very well for the character as it stands now;
but before the Christian era this same character was written
[Illustration] and was a picture, not of men and of a cross, but of a
sheaf of corn. It came to mean “come,” says the Chinese etymologist,
“because corn comes” from heaven.”
Such is the written language of China, and such indeed it was,
already under the dominion of the phonetic system, by which endless new
combinations may still be formed, at the very earliest point to which
history, as distinguished from legend, will carry us,—some eight or
nine centuries B.C. There are no genuine remains of pure
picture-writing, to enable us to judge how far the Chinese had got
before the phonetic system was invented, though many attempts have been
made to palm off gross forgeries as such.
The great majority of characters, as I have said, are capable of
being easily resolved into the two important parts which I have
attempted to describe—the original phonetic portion, which guides
toward pronunciation, and the added indicator, which guides toward the
sense.
Even the practical student, who desires to learn to read and write
Chinese for purely business purposes, will find himself constrained to
follow out this analysis, if he wishes to commit to memory a
serviceable number of characters. With no other hold upon them beyond
their mere outlines, he will find the characters so bewildering, so
elusive, as to present almost insuperable difficulties.
But under the influence of systematic study, coupled with a fair
amount of perseverance, these difficulties disappear, and leave the
triumphant student amply rewarded for his pains.