440
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mankind. It is monosyllabic, and there are not only no inflexions in it, no modification of the mono- syllable corresponding to the cases, numbers, genders, voices, moods, and tenses, of the Aryan and Semitic languages, but also none of the agglutination which characterizes the Turanian languages. If the earliest men spoke in monosyllables--and I suppose there is not one among us who does not believe that they did so--then while I do not say that Chinese is a relic of the carliest human speech, it would seem to be more akin than any other existing language to what that speech was. Tradition assigns the origin of the written characters to a date of nearly 3000 years before Christ, but we can trace their gradual accumulation along nearly the whole course of Chinese history. The principle which directed the first formation of them is the simplest possible. No Chinese has ever conceived, so far as I know, the idea of analysing his words into elementary sounds, and going on to form an alphabet for the purpose of representing them. Even when scholars came into contact with Sanskrit, and were led in our 5th century to frame a method of what has been called spelling for their own words, they did so by a clumsy device far inferior to the nicety of an alphabetic system.
The first characters which were formed were pictorial. These were multiplied by combining them, or slightly altering their figure, so as to form ideagrams; but not even in this way could characters be formed in sufficient numbers to express the multitudinous objects of sense and our mental con- ceptions. Some of the pictures therefore were em- ployed, and other characters were formed and set apart,
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to express certain phonetic values. By a combination of these the picture or ideagram, and the phonetic symbol-the great mass of the Chinese characters, or nearly forty out of the forty-four thousand, or thereabouts, to which they amount, have been formed, the picture or ideagram in each combination helping the mind to a general idea of the meaning, and the symbol enabling the reader to approximate to the sound.
Foreign students of Chinese were concerned at first with the task of interpretation, and had no leisure to investigate the principles which guided in the formation of the phonetics and the assigning to each its particular sound, or the rules which directed the combination of the two elements. Taking the characters as existing forms indicative of ideas, and printed documents as conveying the narrations and thoughts of their authors, our business was to determine the signification of the characters and the methods for their combination to express connected Grammars thought. This has been attained to. and Dictionaries have been compiled, and a Chinese book can now be translated into English with as In much certainty as a Greek or a Latin one. studying Chinese, indeed, we have this advantage, that the language has never become, as spoken or written, a dead language. For more than four thousand years generation has succeeded generation speaking it; and for more than two thousand years one school of writers has succeeded another, main- taining the tradition of ancient views and inter- pretations. Changes there have been in pronun- ciation as well as in idiom and style; but slight as compared with those that have taken place in other
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