The Worthington advance., 1900-11-30

s#l 81 s .Ss .s Read AlouA.
language without IN alphabet
sounds sufficiently curious, especiallys
when Il is added that itkis essvritte tent
language and the medium Of commune
cation throughout that enormous ex-:
Spanse of territory, the Chinese empire
Not only has the Chinese Language no,
alphabet, but it. is actually true that
in its purest form, though it could,
literally speaking, be read aloud. the
sounds would have absolutely no sig
.nificance whatever to . listener, says
the London Express. D
j To the reader, of course, the written
or printed page would convey all that
the author wished 1t TO. But IN order
to convey it's meaning, say to a blind
person, the reader would be compelled,
to find his own words, chosen from the
spoken Chinese language. And his
translation" would be much more
roundabout and lengthy than the writ
ten version. ~ / -
Some idea Of this singular fact may
be gathered from the estimate that
the fable of the Fox and, the Grapes"
which can be told in 100 English words,
could be narrated in IS Chinese written
characters To tell the storyin spoken
Chinese would require 163 words.
Written Chinese is practically uni,
form throughout the empire, and has
hardly altered during the entire course
of Chinese. history. The spoken Ian,
guage, on the other hand, is constantly
changing, and prevails in several dia-
lects, some of which are quite unin-
telligible to Chinese from the different
provinces.
But even the purest form Of spoken
Chinese is almost incomprehensible to
foreigner, except by the most arduous
study, and after years of application
the European continues to make the
most ludicrous blunders. The reason
for this is that the Chinese tongue has
but 500 to 1000 elementary words,
which form the base of their language
as the alphabet does of ours..{ Infor-
der to spin out these to their needs,
they pronounce them in different
''tones," each "tone'' giving an entire.
ly altered meaning. yss I .z, III / 5
In some parts of the empire as many
as eight ''tones'' are in use, giving
eight signitications to words whose
actual pronunciation is otherwise the
same. No wonder. the European ear
jibs at the task!-the ninth meaning
of Greek particle is nothing to the
eighth stone" of a Chinese noun.
Chinese has no grammar as we know
grammar. According to it's position
in sentence a word is either noun,
adj jective, verb or adverb-the word
itself remains the same. In this re-
spect Chinese is a ''baby" among Ian
guages. But, like so many other things
that the celestial has invented and left
as he invented, the Chinese tongue has
never grown up. And yet, with all it's
drawbacks, the literary men of the
fiowery land have contrived to make it
serve their purpose. But almost all the
classical, phnosophicalaand historical
works of the Chinese are written III the
queer characters that only mean some
thing to the eye and cannot be made
to mean anything tothe ear.
Where the Chinese. language-writ-
ten or spoken-came from nobody
knows, any more than they know where
the original Chinese themselves came
from. But it is probable that the
primary Chinese characters existed
5000 years ago pretty much as they do
to-day. They are written in vertical
columns, which begin on the right of
the paper. The instrument is a brush
and thick solution of India ink is the
medium--the paper the familiar himsy
material made from rice straw. .,'s
Oddly enough, though, the Manchus,
who are the ruling race in China, al
well as their Tartar relatives, the Mon
gols, speak language related to the
Chinese, they have proper alphabet,
derived indirectly from the west. It
was borrowed from the Syriac, which
was derived from the Aramaic which
came from the Phoenician- alphabet,
And the Roman letters of to-day owe
more than little to the Phoenician.
So the Tartar writing is at one end of
a chain that stretches to our own ABC.
The Tartars owe their alphabet to the
Christian missionaries known as the
Nestorians. But that is another story.
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