Daily Kennebec journal. [microfilm reel] (Augusta, Me.) 1870-1975, 1913-01-04
THE CHINESE ALPHABET.
Battling Creation That May Be Re-
formed Some Day.

| China, the prehistoric child. has al
| last reached the toddling stage; she
| has begun to crawl about on the world
floor to see what the rest of the chill
dren of mother earth are doing. The
newly formed republic has already be-
gun the building of railroads and
steamship lines, one of the greatest
steps toward the unfieation of the
scattered people, and now at Hong
kong a learned Chinese scholar has
| formulated an alphabet of A letters
which contains the phonetic and her
oglyphic symbols of the present COM
pick language.
Two hundred years ago the emperor,
Kang Hi, established a school for the
sole purpose of trying to unity the
language of the Wide-spreading en-
pire, but it met with no success. First,
because the lack of facilities for trav-
Ell kept the people so widely scattered
that they could not mingle with one
another, and, second, and more inn
portant, the language of China is not
an alphabetical language but Ian
gGage made up of thousands Of word
pictures which are unintellgible to the
great mass of the people.
The Chinese dictionary, for instance,
is made up of many thousands of char
acters, all built around 214 so-called
key words, but the characters formed
from these words amount to, approx
imatelY 27.000. Ne man, especially the
hard working Chinaman, has time to
learn all these characters, or even
small part of them, and in conse-
quence the great number of Cinnamon
cannot read. Again, the colloquial
Chinese is as different from the writ
ten Chinese as French Is from Latin,
and the colI0quial Chinese has some
30 odd dialects.
Chinese history tells us that the
Sung dynasty, 1000 A. D., brought the
language to a point where it was AN
effective instrument for expressing the
national mind" Unfortunately. it loses
its effect when only a very few peo-
pie in nation of 100000 600 can I'M
derstand what the national mind"
has to express.
The heads of the new republic have
come to realize that without some
sort of a universal language the uni
fication of the vast republic is going
at last we have one.
To reduce a language from many
thousands of characters to an alpha
bette language of Al letters is indeed
Herculean task. yet it seems to have
been very well accomplished.
To understand this new alphabet a
slight knowledge of the Chinese of the
past must he had. The Chinese built
their language on pictures. To learn
all these idiographs and then to re-
member them is we'll nigh Impossible.
The japanese realized this in their
own language, greatly akin to the
Chinese, and formed simplified Yo-
cabulary which is now in general use.
The new alphabet represents the
sounds of which the word is composed
as opposed to the character which di-
rectly represents d whole word-the
embodiment of an idea.
The introduction of such an alpha
bet would be an enormous step to-
ward unifying China, though, of
course, its introduction will take a
long time perhaps grow up with the
coming generation. But it means
that the printing of Chinese will be
ltiIlt easy No lOISt1 w III lile NIllUtSt
typesettcr have 70 look over thous-
ands Of complicated characters; no
longer will printing be so expensive;
no longer will the schoolhoy be over
burdened with page after page of use
less characters.
one year China has lived as a re-
public and passed through the great
ordeal much better than many of her
western friends. Another year will
bring about even greater changes and
with the Introduction of a universal
alphabet will come a wider scope of
learning, a better system of educa-
tion.--New York Times.
DR.. Otto kummel head of the East
AsiatiG department of the Berlin Mu-
scum of Ethnology tells of the oldest
museum in the world in the bulletin
of the Society Frapeo-J aponaise. This
museum may be found in the city of
Nara, the former capital of Japan.
Since its foundation, in 1856, it has gone
through all the changes of the Jap
anese Empire WITHOUT one single add
ton to its collection. DR.. Otto Kun
mel is one of the few Europeans who
Were permitted to visit this museum.