# The Chinese language and how to learn it/The Spoken Language

​16 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE n. THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE DURING its progress through a long series of ages the Chinese spoken language, it may readily be supposed, underwent many changes. To refer to one proof alone, the specimens of ancient poetry still in existence establish this fact by the rhyming of words which have now, in many instances, no uniformity of sound. Its origin is, and must remain, a mystery in spite of the array of opinions and judgments concerning it, and as none of them can possibly be conclusive, or indeed more than purely speculative, it seems advisable to leave theory alone, and to pass on at once to modern fact. Those who are interested in the attempts to trace the origin of the language to its source, and to establish its family relationship with the great clan of human tongues, are referred once more to Mr. Watters' Essay on the Chinese Language, and particularly to the chapter entitled " Some Western Opinions." They will there find that it has been regarded by some as a special creation, by others as the language spoken by Noah, and Shem, the son of Noah, who moved into China in time to escape the confusion of tongues ; that others, again, discover a relationship between the language of China and that of ancient Egypt, while some inves- tigators try to prove that there is a connection between Chinese and the Hebrew tongue. Wherever it sprang from originally, we know that the pronuncia- tion of the language in the days of Confucius and that of the present day is so dissimilar as to make it a matter of certainty that Confucius would understand nothing of the speech that now prevails at his native place in the province of Shantung. He might, probably, according to Mr. E. H. Parker,* an eminent authority, be more at home in Korea, or Annam, or, possibly, Canton, but he certainly would be unable to understand his own remarks as recited by the modern school-boy in any part of the Empire. And it may
be as well at this stage to state that China, which, during the early part of her history was often divided into small states, is not a country in which one spoken language prevails, varied only by provincialisms, but, to quote again from Professor Giles, there are about eight well-marked dialects, all clearly of a common stock, but go distinct as to constitute eight different languages, any two of which are quite as unlike as English and Dutch. These dialects, as pointed out by Professor Giles,* fringe the coast line of China, and between Canton, on the extreme south, and Shanghai, near the mouth of the Yangtsze, we encounter no less than seven dialects, each so different from the other as to be quite unintelligible to any but a native of the particular district in which the dialect prevails. Throughout the region of the Yangtsze Valley, as it has now come to be called, and from thence northwards, we " come 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." Throughout this region, " Mandarin," or the official dialect, will be understood, and Mandarin in its purest form is now the Mandarin of Peking, or the Court dialect, which is to other forms of Mandarin somewhat as Parisian French is to the provincial dialects of France. It is to Mandarin, therefore, and especially to Pekingese Mandarin, that the following remarks will apply. Theoretically, Chinese colloquial is not a difficult language to acquire. The street " coolie " of Peking, whose speech is practically the same as that of the highest official, has a vocabulary of a few hundred words at the outside which are amply sufficient for his wants. He can say anything he wishes to say with this stock of words, and is never at a loss for an expression. A foreign child brought up under the charge of a Chinese nurse will pick up Chinese words with much greater facility than it will imbibe English, and will be talking fluently in the vernacular long before it can do more than babble in the language of its parents, and yet a foreign adult may spend a lifetime in the country and not know ten words of Chinese. No traveller can pass two months in Japan
"Pidgin" English, as the barbarous English spoken by the Chinese coolie or servant in Hong Kong is called, is nothing more or less than a literal translation of Chinese into English. The Englishman will pick it up in a week, and yet, if he tries to turn "pidgin" English into Chinese, he will find that at the end of twelve months he has made lamentably little progress. It may safely be said that any young Englishman of average intelligence and education who lived in France or in Germany for two years and devoted the whole of his time to the study of either language, would become a fluent speaker and writer at the end of that period. The Chinese Consular Service of Great Britain is officered by men who pass a severe competitive examination before admission, and must consequently be above the average standard of education and ability. The first two years of their career are spent in Peking, where the whole of their time is devoted to the study of the language under experienced supervision, and yet, at the end of this two years' course, there is not one of them who could personally conduct a correspondence in Chinese, translate an official document without the aid of a dictionary, or speak with sufficient fluency to act as an interpreter where important negotiations were concerned. Before they can reach this standard of proficiency they have at least five or six years of work before them.
What is the reason? There is nothing specially complicated about the language. Far from this being the case, its construction is fairly simple, much more so than that of a scientific language, German for instance, and in the matter of the expression of simple wants there is nothing difficult whatever. Yet it is not too much to say that not ten per cent, of Europeans who have devoted several years to the study of the language speak really well; that it requires from five to ten years constant practice to speak fluently, and that there is probably hardly a living instance of a European speaking Chinese so well as to be undistinguishable from a native. ​THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 19 On the other hand, any one who will take the trouble can acquire a sufficient vocabulary at the end of a few months to make his ordinary wants known, or to travel anywhere without the aid of an interpreter. If he wishes to get beyond this elementary stage he must make up his mind for some very up-hill work. In later chapters an attempt is made to assist the student in acquiring such a knowledge of the spoken language as will enable him to carry qn an ordinary conversation. At the present stage it will suffice to indicate in general terms a few of the difficulties with which the learner has to contend, together with certain marked differences between the written and the spoken language. The first of these difficulties is undoubtedly intonation, which, as stated above, is also an important feature in Chinese composition. The Chinese language is restricted in the matter of sounds, of which there are, in the Peking dialect, about four hundred. It follows therefore that many words must have the same sound. In writing, this deficiency could naturally be ignored, as each ideograph speaks for itself, but, in speaking, it is evident that unless some means were devised by which words of the same sound could be distinguished, much confusion would result. But there is a system by which these sounds are sub-divided. In the first place, a considerable multiplication is effected by the expedient of duplicating many sounds having certain initial consonants by the interposition of an aspirate between the initial consonant and the vowel. By many Irishmen such a word as " chair " would be pronounced ch'air, with a strong aspirate after the ch. So, in Chinese, we have Chi and Ch'i, tang and fang, pa and p'a, and very many others, adding a large percentage to the number of sounds. But this number is still more appreciably increased by the pronunciation of the same sounds in different tones or inflections of the voice. Take, for instance, the sound chi. Under this sound are ranged no less than 135 characters, all pronounced chi. Although the number of conversational words pronounced chi is not so numerous as the written words, there is, none the less, a considerable number. We have, to quote a very few, chi, a chicken, chi, excited, chi, to push, chi, to remember. How are we to know which is which ? The way they are distinguished is by intonation. The first chi is pronounced in an absolutely even tone, the voice ​20 THE CHINESE LANGUAGE neither rising nor falling, and this it is customary to indicate by chi 1 . The second, which we will call c/u 2 , is pronounced in a rising tone something like an interrogative chi 2 ?. The third, in a falling tone, chfi, something like a tone of reproof with a rise at the end ; and the fourth, chi*, in an abrupt and somewhat dictatorial manner. To a Chinese, these tones come naturally, but to a foreign ear and tongue they present a great difficulty, to some an insur- mountable difficulty, and yet, unless accurately pronounced, the word is not only as discordant as a false quantity would be in Latin, but is also extremely liable to be misunderstood. If we wished to remark that we did not require chicken, we ought to say pu l yao 4 chi 1 . If we said instead, pu l yao? chi 1 , it would mean " do not bite the chicken," pu l yao* chi, 2 " do not be impatient," pu l yao 4 " chi* " don't shove," pu l ydo* c/ii 4 , " don't want to make a note of." It is evident, therefore, that tones are a very important element in the spoken language, indeed an all important one, and neglect or misuse of these tones will land the speaker in many and sometimes awkward, difficulties. A fluent and correct speaker will play upon these tones as the fingers of a violinist play up and down the strings of his instrument, and a false tone, apart from conveying a false meaning, is like a false note in music. This tonic system plays a part also in Chinese composition. In poetry, and generally in prose composition, only words of a certain tone can occupy fixed places in a clause or line of a certain length, and any deviation from rule will set the line out of tune, though a regard for these rules is not necessary for purposes of clearness ; rather the reverse, and they can be ignored in a document of an official or business nature. A further aid to definiteness in conversation consists in the use of prefixes and suffixes in connection with certain nouns that stand alone in writing, and in the use of two or more words in speaking where one is used in writing. And here we come to the essential difference between the written and the spoken language. The former can be fairly called monosyllabic; the latter is undoubtedly syllabic. To begin with the prefix. The sound jen 2 means man, but it also means benevolence. In speaking, we distinguish the former ​THE CHINESE LANGUAGE 21 from the latter by the pre-position of what, for want of a better word, may be called a classifying article. The most common of these is Ko, best translated by the word "piece/' In writing, man (or men), is indicated by one character; in speaking, it is i ko jen, one "piece" man, or chi ko jen, some "piece" man. So again, ping, a soldier, also ice, but in speaking, i ho ping, one piece soldier, i k'uai ping, a bit of ice. There are several dozen of these classifiers, each of which takes a certain number of nouns under its protection. Again, in the written language the character yin 2 is silver; in speaking, we distinguish this yin from many other similar sounds, and indicate that it is a substantive, by calling it yintzu ; so also, in writing, inao, a hat, in speaking, maotzu. This rule holds good of a large number of nouns, but not of all, and there are other suffixes besides the one mentioned. As a further illustration of the syllabic nature of the spoken language a few more examples may be given. To be willing in written Chinese is yuan ; in colloquial it is yuam ' ; i, intention, colloquial, issu; li, a hedge, colloquial, lipa ; huan, to rejoice, colloquial, hsihuan. Other expressions in the spoken language are entirely different from those in writing, as jih, sun, colloquial, t'aiyang or jiht'ou, but it may be said generally that there is a close analogy between the two, the essential difference lying in the fact that whereas redundancy is necessary in speaking to ensure intelligibility, the written language aims at conciseness and the elimination of all superfluity of words. Pronunciation, apart from intonation, is a further serious impediment in the way of the speaker, such sounds as chih, jih, tzu, ssu, tz l u, ch'u, etc., which are incapable of exact reproduction by any recognized system of spelling, requiring months of practice before they can be uttered correctly. And, finally, it is necessary to forget one's own idiom when trying to talk Chinese, and to remember that what in the one language seems a complicated sentence can often be rendered with great simplicity in the other. The Chinese language abounds in proverbial and idiomatic expressions. It is in the discovery of these, and the right use of them, coupled with the appropriate gestures, mannerisms and intonations, that the secret of successful speaking lies. As a final demonstration of the distinction that is drawn between the written and the spoken languages, it may be stated that the ​Chinese do not read books of a high-class character aloud to an audience. One could not imagine, for instance, a public reading of the poems of a Chinese Milton, Browning or Tennyson, or of Macaulay's Essays, for the simple reason that they would not be understood if they had not been studied beforehand by the audience, letting alone the fact that half the so-called beauties of Chinese composition gain nothing by recitation. The only instance of recitation in book language is to be found on the stage. There, historical plays are presented in which the actors talk like books, but as the audience have either read the books or know all about the incidents represented, they can follow the dialogue and understand the plot. It is quite possible to write down colloquial Chinese, but it is never so written except in a few novels or in the minutes of evidence taken in a court of Law. If a Chinese were called upon to record a conversation he would inevitably transpose it into literary form.
III.
It has been suggested in the previous section that the vocabulary of the ordinary Chinese working man does not exceed a few hundred words, and it is obvious that any one who could secure a knowledge of these words would be on the high road to an understanding of the language spoken by the Chinese coolie. A thorough working acquaintance with the vocabulary of a coolie in all its varied combinations would be sufficient for most people, as the coolie, to all intents and purposes, speaks the language which his master speaks, and if his stock of Chinese words could be handled in the way that he handles them the person who possessed this faculty would have little left to desire. The full possession of this facility is more than the few succeeding chapters profess to offer the student, but at least it is possible to supply him with a fairly representative list of words and to indicate a few of the numberless combinations which they can be made to form. If he will take the trouble to make this list his own he will find it comparatively easy to enlarge his vocabulary by the aid of text books and dictionaries. Of the former, the two most in use are the Tzŭ Erh Chi, by the late Sir Thomas Wade, and Mandarin Lessons, by the Rev. C. W. Mateer. An Anglo-Chinese glossary of words in common use will be furnished in a separate volume. The written language would require a somewhat larger stock of characters, which cannot be used in precisely the same way, but this subject will be dealt with separately. The present and succeeding chapters will deal exclusively with the colloquial form of Chinese.
It may be as well to repeat at this point that Chinese do not write as they speak, and that when we write down words as they are spoken we are, so to speak, treading on the susceptibilities of the Chinese scholar, who regards written colloquial as unscholarly, but for educational purposes the prejudice of the Chinese pedant may well be ignored. It may be asked, "Why, in this case, is it necessary for the student of colloquial Chinese to learn the character at all? Would not a transliteration of the sounds as in an alphabetical language satisfy all requirements?" The experiment has been tried, but it has never been a success, owing, amongst other causes, to the complications presented by the four intonations referred to in the previous chapter, while it is most unsatisfactory to find one's horizon limited by ​ignorance of the symbols used by the people themselves. There is probably no short cut to a knowledge of any language, and certainly none to Chinese. If a student will not take the small amount of trouble necessary to master eight hundred to a thousand symbols he had better leave Chinese alone
The question of pronunciation must be faced at the outset. If the learner goes far wrong in his initial appreciation of the value of Chinese sounds he will find it difficult to correct his mistakes later on. Some Chinese sounds are incapable of production by any alphabetical combinations, and nothing but oral demonstration will make them clear, but, happily, these are few, and most of them can be spelt in such a way that any one should be able to pronounce them fairly correctly. If it were a question merely of inventing a vocabulary for the use of the English student alone the matter would be comparatively simple, but what has been aimed at by those who have tried to work out a system of spelling is to produce something of a cosmopolitan nature that shall be understood by all. The result has been that no one can understand any of the various systems elaborated without divesting himself of preconceived notions as to how certain combinations of letters should be pronounced, and beginners often go astray because they have not carefully studied the directions as to the way to read the vocabularies. Of these there are several, but the best system of transliteration is undoubtedly that elaborated by Sir Thomas Wade. It is, necessarily, not perfect, but it is probably as good as any that can be made, and in spite of much antagonism it has held its own and has outlived various systems which other scholars have endeavoured to force upon the public. All English- speaking people accept it, and though other nationalities spell many Chinese sounds in their own way, they have to fall back on the Wade system when writing for universal information.
The sounds as expressed in the Wade system are given below, and, in order to make them as intelligible as possible, alternative spellings in simple English form are added to each sound. If the reader will bear in mind that A is always pronounced ar, that I is ee or i as in French, and U oo, he will be saved much confusion. Other peculiarities will, to a certain extent, be indicated by the alternative spellings, and an attempt is made to show how the specially difficult sounds can be reproduced.