The scholar who examines the structure and evolution of human speech finds material of the highest value in every one of the several thousand languages of the world. The phonetic laws and inflexions of a South Sea language or a Negro language may be just as instructive, in the comparative study of linguistics, as the corresponding phenomena in Latin or German. The non-specialist public, on the contrary, attaches a widely varying value to the different languages. On the one hand, a language is considered of more practical importance the larger extension it has, i.e. the greater the number of people...

If, in order to find our way in the vast domain of the Chinese language, we start with an investigation of the ancient language preserved in the inscriptions and the classical books, we at once realize a fact that must strike everybody who studies Chinese civilization, that in China things are very often diametrically opposite to all that we are accustomed to in the West. The scholar who examines, for instance, the oldest monuments of Scandinavian language, the runic stones, proceeds first of all to determine the sounds, the phonetic values, of the separate runes; when he has done this,...

If we now proceed to examine how Chinese words, and primarily the simple words, are constituted, we shall find that monosyllabism has produced some very remarkable results. The number of pronounceable syllables is not unlimited. The more words the language created—and it must be remembered that we are dealing with a civilized language which had at an early date a rich vocabulary—the more difficult it became to prevent two or more words from becoming similar, if not absolutely identical, in pronunciation. And this homophony was considerably increased by the fact that Chinese, in the course of its evolution,...

The origin and early history of Chinese script, like those of the people and the language, are enveloped in the mist of legend.

Long, long ago, in the golden age, there was a dragon horse which came up out of the Yellow River with curious symbols traced upon its back, and revealed them to Fu-hi (the first of China’s legendary primæval emperors). This potentate copied them and thus acquired the mystical characters which later became the skeleton of I King, the Canon of Changes, one of the Five Canons. And under the third primæval emperor, Huang-ti, the minister Ts’ang Kie...

If in the foregoing chapters we have given some account of the material of the Chinese language, the simple words and their representation in script, we have not yet dealt with it as a medium for the expression of thought. The word is a unity arrived at by an analytical process, and the unit of speech is not the word but the sentence, though some sentences may consist of a single word, as ‘Yes’ or ‘Jones’ (in answer to such a question as: ‘Who is there?’).

Our next inquiry therefore will be: How does Chinese construct its sentences? How are...

In giving an account of the simple words, their representation in script, and the mode of their combination in compounds, phrases, and sentences, we have outlined the general structure of the Chinese language. But one important point remains, its artistic embellishment. No language is appropriately characterized unless due attention is paid to style, and in Chinese this is of particular importance because certain stylistic peculiarities play a predominant part in its use; and these peculiarities are indirectly an outcome of the phenomena discussed in the preceding chapter.

It is evident that the great latitude in the meaning of words, the...