The times., 1901-06-02
AN INTRICATE LANGUAGE.
Chinese Tongue Foreigners Can
Never Thoroughly Master.
(From the Chicago New

An English infantry officer. who has
| been making a study of the Chinese Ian
! guage in connection with the effort of the
| of the British Government to encourage
| the study of Chinese among army men
| has made report which is likely to dis
hearten prospective Chinese scholars. The
| subjects of Kwang- Hsu have the most
| ancient of spoken and written Ian
! guages, and while the simplest in con-
struction 1t is, paradoxically, universally
acknowledged to be almost the most diff
| ficuit to master. Foreigners who can,
unassisted. write the language freely can
be counted on the fingers of the hand,
| and, according to the English officer who
made the investigation. twenty years is
not considered an extravagant period TO
devote to acquiring an oral mastery of
its fntricacies. Every word is a mono-
syllable, some 460 in all constituting the
language, which has neither number nor
! case nor gender with regard to nouns.
nor tense nor mood nor person with re-
gard to verbs Nor is it possible to make
these distinctions by means of prefixes
or suffiXes, for these do not exist. There
fore the same word without change of
form may be used as noun, verb, an
adjective, an adverb. or a participle.
It's very simplicity IS the cause of its
great difficulty. Since the E;Inber of words
in the most ordinary use is somewhere be-
tween 5000 and 400 "a Chinese newspaper
has font of 5000 and the number of
possible monosyuabic combinations is only
46O, there must be some way of increasing
the number of sounds to enable words to
be distinguished the one from the other
This is accordingly done by giving every
monosyilable four different tones-that is
IN PekineSe. In some other dialects there
are as many as seven IT is easy to i'm
aglne the impeachment caused to fuency in
speaking by the observance of these tones
II takes month or two. in the first in
stance. to train the ear TO recognize that
there is a difference when the tones are
pronounced by native, even with the
greatest emphasis, and yet they are of the
utmost Importance; for instance ''yeu"
tone l is tobacco" ''veu tone 2 is"saIt:''
besides these obviosly mistakabIe mean
Ings. yep in tone l possesses twenty
four other meanings, tone 2, thirty-fve:
thlrty-ntne in tone 3. and forty in tone e.
The written language presents still fur
ther obstacles. 1t is destitute of an al
symbol or character, which has only the
slightest connection with any other and
must be learned by sheer memory. Some
of these characters have rs many as thfr-
ty dots and strokes. Going still further
afield we are confronted with the different
Kinds OF language that exist. There is the
language of the ancient classics the more
modern languages, the language of official
documents, and the epistolary language
all of which differ in no small degree from
the spoken language, which again possess
eS numerous dialects. differing so widely
from one another that Cinnamon from one
province cannot understand those from
another. A popularity of these dialects,
however, Is that their difference lies solely
in the fact that different sounds and tones
are given to the characters. The written
however. and Pel1inese, which is practi-
cally what is known as Kuan Kwa or the
mandarin dialect, is the official language
recognized throughout the Empire