6
trived; and this is a matter which may well engage the attention of that section of the Faculty of Arts in the Hongkong University which devotes itself to the study of the Chinese language and litera- ture.
← homme
and the the French child Cantonese child "yan” (A). But if I write alphabetically the word" magnanimity,' English, French and Cantonese children, provided they can spell, will all give it much the same sound. Now this fact has had an important historical result in China for it is the reason why the Chinese spoken language changes from province to province, although the writ- ten language is the same throughout the length and breadth of the land. Let me take for instance, a Chinese word, which has been adopted into the English lang uage and which is constantly on our lips, the word tea. The ideogram for this word () is pronounced ch'a both by Cantonese and Pekingese and thence comes the Russian chai, doubtless be- cause the Russians got their tea from the Chinese of the north. But the same ideogram in Fukien is pronounced ti; and. as British traders first brought tea to England from the Fukien province, it was natural that they should bring with them its Fukienese name and hence the English word "tea." Now it is evident that two Chinese, who wish to talk about tea, will not easily understand each other if, while one speaks of the beverage as ti. the other calls it ch'a: and this is only one instance of the strangely different sounds given by Chinese in dif- ferent provinces to the same ideogram in a very great number of cases. Con-word and it may be analysed as follows: sequently, whereas the written language has been a bond of union between the Eighteen Provinces, the spoken language divides various sections of the Chinese race quite as much as different languages divide the several nations of Europe. The inconvenience of this fact can be readily experienced by anyone who moves among the Chinese population of Hongkong. Most people here speak Cantonese, but the chair-coolies are generally Hoklos, the villagers are often Hakkas, and many of the Chinese police are from Shantung and speak the dialect of that province. I have myself heard two Chinese in Hongkong talking to each other in 'pidgeon English of lingua Franca, because one was from the north and the other from the south, and therefore they could not understand For the each other's native speech. future of China, if it is ever to have national unity, few things are of greater importance than that a speech common to the Eighteen Provinces should be con-
MISTRANSLATION OF BUDDHIST SUTRAS.
But the difficulty, which I have just described, is only one of many which beset the Chinese language, whether spoken or written. The object of human speech is, of course, to give utterance to human thought; and the various human lang uages differ in merit according as they are capable of expressing each and every thought which enters into the mind of man. Language should also be capable of translating accurately the speech and thoughts of one people into those of another people. Now it is possible to render into English and into several other languages with very reasonable accuracy anything that the Chinese write or say; but from early times the Chinese themselves have experienced difficulty in translating the works of other peoples into their own language. Let me take first the case of a famous Chinese mis- translation from the Buddhist sutras. In the Sanskrit version of the sutras, from which the Chinese translated, Buddha is very frequently called valakiteevara. This is a compound
Ira is a preposition and means "over": lokita is the participle of the verb lok to look" and ava-lokita means over- looking." Now there is in Sanskrit a set of phonetic laws, called Sandhi, governing the manner in which vowels and consonants are combined; and one of these laws prescribes that, when the vowels a and meet, they merge into the vowel sound e. Bearing this law in mind and resolving the letter avalokiteçvara into its component parts, we find that the latter half of the com- pound is the word içuara meaning
44
F
as a sort
بینایی
in
sovereign." The whole compound, therefore, is a description of Buddha as the sovereign who overlooks mankind from above. But the Chinese translators knew nothing of sandhi, and they also failed to take note of the fact that there are in Sanskrit three sibilants, which western schoars transliterate S, C and Sh respectively. Accordingly they analy- sed the compound avalokiteçvara into two component parts avalokita and
Of
over-
).
suara, which they translated as looking" (kun ) and "sound" (yam
course, the phrase "Overlooking Sound "
makes nonsense: but neverthe. less the words Kun-yam or in Pekingese Kuan-yin and in Japanese Kwannon have now
a very wide vogue and form the name of a much-worshipped goddess in the Buddhist pantheon. May I, how- ever, explain to you the reason why I have
into such detail concerning gone this mistranslation? It is because I defy any Chinese scholar, be he a hon-lam or even a chong-yün to translate what I have just said into Chinese. The Chinese language is such that these thoughts cannot be expressed in it and that Chinese words for much of what I have just said do not exist. The Chinese translators of the Buddhist sutras felt this difficulty themselves. There was a time in the earlier period of my service in Hongkong when I amused myself by making a detailed comparison between some of the Sanskrit sutras and their Chinese translations. All that I then did went to the bottom of Hongkong harbour with several other manuscripts in the typhoon of 1906; but I well remember that time and again, as I read the Chinese version, I came upon passages which seemed entirely meaningless until I turned to the Sanskrit original, when I found that the Chinese was at these points not a translation but a translitera- tion from the Sanskrit. The baffled Chinese translator had, in fact, content ed himself with reproducing the sound, and not the sense, of the Sanskrit words.
clear that no works on such subjects can be translated into Chinese without adopt- ing the whole system of numerical and mathematical notation invented in the The fact is that the Chinese west? language and the Chinese script form an excellent medium for the study of things Chinese, but that Chinese mono- syllables and Chinese ideograms are a kind of linguistic bed of Procrustes, into which thoughts and words that are alien to the Chinese can only be forced by such drastic choppings and changings as to render them unrecognizable.
WORK FOR THE FACULTY OF ARTS.
or
Now, inasmuch as no true educational advance in China can be made without an assimilation of western knowledge, it follows either that the Chinese spoken and written language must be modified by the addition to it of an alphabet in a manner similar to that in which the Japanese kana supplements the Japanese ideograms, else that the Chinese people must become bilingual and teach their children some alphabetic foreign language in addition to their mother tongue. A decision between these alter-
will have very natives
far-reaching effects upon the future of China: and I suggest that this problem also may with advantage be studied by the Faculty of Arts in this University. It is a problem which must certainly be faced by the Government of Hongkong in connection with the vernacular schools for which we are responsible both in the Colony and in the New Territories: and upon its solution will depend the future of our The system of vernacular education. old, time-honoured methods of Chinese education have been destroyed with a startling suddenness and no other well thought-out system has yet taken their place. Chinese children no longer begin their schools days by committing to memory the Sam Tsz King and the Ts'in Tsz Man and thereafter the Four Books and the Five Classics. The old respect has the
essay eight-legged
of vanished and the ancient scheme examinations for provincial and national But no degrees has been abolished.
text-books or authoritative curriculum have far replaced the methods of bygone days; and here again I think that the Faculty of Arts in this University has before it a wide field for
TRANSLATION OF MODERN WRITINGS.
Now I venture to think that, if we pass from ancient to modern times, the difficulties met by the Chinese translators of the Sanskrit sutras will be felt in an even greater degree by any one who to-day attempts to translate, say, Hegel's Logic or the writings of Einstein into Chinese. But it may justly be said that these works are so abstruse that they present great difficulties in respect of translation into any language whatso- .ever. Take, therefore, instead such writings as the simplest text book of English grammar, of modern geo-standard graphy, history or science: how are they to be translated into a non-alphabetical script? Or consider the case of arith- metic, algebra and trigonometry; is it not
or
for
So
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