CO129-180 - Public Offices & Others - 1877 — Page 446

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A question may now arise as to what amount of knowledge of the Chinese language and literature can be communicated through a Chair such as has been constituted here, and I will endeavour to reply to it with precision. Dr. Morrison wrote in 1825 that he believed it practicable to acquire Chinese in this country sufficiently well to write in it for the instruction of the people in China, Japan, Corea, the Liú-ch'iú islands, and Cochin-China. This opinion I cannot endorse without some qualification. It is possible, no doubt, to acquire Chinese here in Oxford so as to make one's own whatever has been written or printed in Chinese, just as it is possible to learn here Greck, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, or Sanskrit, so as to obtain an adequate understanding of whatever exists in the literary monuments of those languages. This is only what was done in Paris by the late Stanislas Julien, who used to glory in the fact that he never in his Chinese studies enjoyed the assistance of a native of China.

And I believe further that it is possible to acquire Chinese here in Oxford, so that one shall be able to express his own thoughts in writing in a style that will be intelligible to a native of any part of China. But that he can express his thoughts in elegant Chinese, or compose a treatise on any given subject which would satisfy a Chinese graduate, and could be presented with advantage to the Chinese public, without the style being polished, or even recast, by a native scholar, that I very much doubt. I do not say that even that degree of attainment is impossible. I have known sinologists whose compositions ap- proached to the brink of it; but the time and practice required for it must be such as few can command.

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With the colloquial use of the language the case is different.

Is there any language of which the. fluent idiomatic use can be acquired without long and habitual intercourse with those who speak it as their mother tongue? And there is a peculiar diffi- culty in a grown-up student's learning to speak Chinese, occasioned by what we call the tones, which vary the meaning of its monosyllabic enunciations, so that the same sound, or what at any rate must be represented by the same English letters, may have many different meanings. But for this, colloquial Chinese would be, I think, of easy acquirement, nor do the tones prove a serious obstacle in the way of children, or even in the way of adults, who can mingle freely and without much mauvaise honte among the natives. My own children and the children of others in similar circumstances always chattered freely in Chinese before they attained to speak any- thing like accurate and grammatical English.

And it must be borne in mind that there are many dialects in China which are not mutually intelligible. The characters are the same in them all. The language, as written or printed, may be studied equally well in any of the dialects; and by means of the pen, the natives of the north and the south, of the east and the west, can have free and ready communication with one another, and also with the educated classes of Japan. The names of the cha- racters, however, are not quite the same in the different dialects, and each dialect has some words and idioms peculiar to itself. It cannot be said, therefore, that a student of Chinese, here or anywhere else, will be able, wherever he lands in China, to converse freely with the people. But if he land where the dialect