_Colloquial._--In treating of Chinese, it will be found convenient to
distinguish, broadly, the spoken from the written language and to deal
with each separately. This is a distinction which would be out of place
if we had to do with any European, or indeed most Oriental languages.
Writing, in its origin, is merely a symbolic representation of speech.
But in Chinese, as we shall see, for reasons connected with the peculiar
nature ot the script, the two soon began to move along independent and
largely divergent lines. This division, moreover, will enable us to
employ different methods of inquiry more suited to each. With regard to
the colloquial, it is hardly possible to do more than consider it in the
form or forms in which it exists at the present day throughout the
empire of China. Although Chinese, like other living languages, must
have undergone gradual changes in the past, so little can be stated with
certainty about these changes that an accurate survey of its evolution
is quite out of the question. Obviously a different method is required
when we come to the written characters. The familiar line, "Litera
scripta manet, volat irrevocabile verbum," is truer perhaps of Chinese
than of any other tongue. We have hardly any clue as to how Chinese was
spoken or pronounced in any given district 2000 years ago, although
there are written remains dating from long before that time; and in
order to gain an insight into the structure of the characters now
existing, it is necessary to trace their origin and development.
The dialects.
Beginning with the colloquial, then, and taking a linguistic survey of
China, we find not one spoken language but a number of dialects, all
clearly of a common stock, yet differing from one another as widely as
the various Romance languages in southern Europe--say, French, Italian
and Spanish. Most of these dialects are found fringing the coast-line of
China, and penetrating but a comparatively short way into the interior.
Starting from the province of Kwang-tung in the south, where the
Cantonese and farther inland the Hakka dialects are spoken, and
proceeding northwards, we pass in succession the following dialects:
Swatow, Amoy--these two may almost be regarded as one--Foochow, Wenchow
and Ningpo. Farther north we come into the range of the great dialect
popularly known as Mandarin (_Kuan hua_ or "official language"), which
sweeps round behind the narrow strip of coast occupied by the various
dialects above-mentioned, and dominates a hinterland constituting nearly
four-fifths of China proper. Mandarin, of which the dialect of Peking,
the capital since 1421, is now the standard form, comprises a
considerable number of sub-dialects, some of them so closely allied that
the speakers of one are wholly intelligible to the speakers of another,
while others (e.g. the vernaculars of Yangchow, Hankow or Mid-China and
Ss[)u]-ch'uan) may almost be considered as separate dialects. Among all
these, Cantonese is supposed to approximate most nearly to the primitive
language of antiquity, whereas Pekingese perhaps has receded farthest
from it. But although philologically and historically speaking Cantonese
and certain other dialects may be of greater interest, for all practical
purposes Mandarin, in the widest sense of the term, is by far the most
important. Not only can it claim to be the native speech of the majority
of Chinamen, but it is the recognized vehicle of oral communication
between all Chinese officials, even in cases where they come from the
same part of the country and speak the same _patois_. For these
reasons, all examples of phraseology in this article will be given in
Pekingese.
So far, stress has been laid chiefly on the dissimilarity of the
dialects. On the other hand, it must be remembered that they proceed
from the same parent stem, are spoken by members of the same race, and
are united by the bond of writing which is the common possession of all,
and cannot be regarded as derived from one more than from another. They
also share alike in the two most salient features of Chinese as a whole:
(1) they are all monosyllabic, that is, each individual word consists of
only one syllable; and (2) they are strikingly poor in vocables, or
separate sounds for the conveyance of speech. The number of these
vocables varies from between 800 and 900 in Cantonese to no more than
420 in the vernacular of Peking. This scanty number, however, is eked
out by interposing an aspirate between certain initial consonants and
the vowel, so that for instance _p'u_ is distinguished from _pu_. The
latter is pronounced with little or no emission of breath, the "p"
approximating the farther north one goes (e.g. at Niuchwang) more
closely to a "b." The aspirated _p'u_ is pronounced more like our
interjection "Pooh!" To the Chinese ear, the difference between the two
is very marked. It will be found, as a rule, that an Englishman imparts
a slight aspirate to his p's, t's, k's and ch's, and therefore has
greater difficulty with the unaspirated words in Chinese. The aspirates
are better learned by the ear than by the eye, but in one way or another
it is essential that they be mastered by any one who wishes to make
himself intelligible to the native.
The influence of the Mongolian population, assisted by the progress of
time, has slowly but surely diminished the number of vocables in
Pekingese. Thus the initials _ts_ and _k_, when followed by the vowel
_i_ (with its continental value) have gradually become softer and more
assimilated to each other, and are now all pronounced _ch_. Again, all
consonantal endings in _t_ and _k_, such as survive in Cantonese and
other dialects, have entirely disappeared from Pekingese, and _n_ and
_ng_ are the only final consonants remaining. Vowel sounds, on the other
hand, have been proportionately developed, such compounds as _ao, ia,
iao, iu, ie, ua_ occurring with especial frequency. (It must be
understood, of course, that the above are only equivalents, not in all
cases very exact, for the sounds of a non-alphabetic language.)
An immediate consequence of this paucity of vocables is that one and the
same sound has to do duty for different words. Reckoning the number of
words that an educated man would want to use in conversation at
something over four thousand, it is obvious that there will be an
average of ten meanings to each sound employed. Some sounds may have
fewer meanings attached to them, but others will have many more. Thus
the following represent only a fraction of the total number of words
pronounced _shih_ (something like the "shi" in shirt): [Ch] "history,"
[Ch] "to employ," [Ch] "a corpse," [Ch] "a market," [Ch] "an army," [Ch]
"a lion," [Ch] "to rely on," [Ch] "to wait on," [Ch] "poetry," [Ch]
"time," [Ch] "to know," [Ch] "to bestow," [Ch] "to be," [Ch] "solid,"
[Ch] "to lose," [Ch] "to proclaim," [Ch] "to look at," [Ch] "ten," [Ch]
"to pick up," [Ch] "stone," [Ch] "generation," [Ch] "to eat," [Ch] "a
house," [Ch] "a clan," [Ch] "beginning," [Ch] "to let go," [Ch] "to
test," [Ch] "affair," [Ch] "power," [Ch] "officer," [Ch] "to swear,"
[Ch] "to pass away," [Ch] "to happen." It would be manifestly impossible
to speak without ambiguity, or indeed to make oneself intelligible at
all, unless there were some means of supplementing this deficiency of
sounds. As a matter of fact, several devices are employed through the
combination of which confusion is avoided. One of these devices is the
coupling of words in pairs in order to express a single idea. There is a
word [Ch] _ko_ which means "elder brother." But in speaking, the sound
_ko_ alone would not always be easily understood in this sense. One must
either reduplicate it and say _ko-ko_, or prefix [Ch] (_ta_, "great")
and say _ta-ko_. Simple reduplication is mostly confined to family
appellations and such adverbial phrases as [Ch][Ch] _man-man_, "slowly."
But there is a much larger class of pairs, in which each of the two
components has the same meaning. Examples are: [Ch][Ch] _k'ung-p'a_,
"to be afraid," [Ch][Ch] _kao-su_, "to tell," [Ch][Ch] _shu-mu_, "tree,"
[Ch][Ch] _p'i-fu_, "skin," [Ch][Ch] _man-ying_, "full," [Ch][Ch]
_ku-tu_, "solitary." Sometimes the two parts are not exactly synonymous,
but together make up the sense required. Thus in [Ch][Ch] _i-shang_,
"clothes," _i_ denotes more particularly clothes worn on the upper part
of the body, and _shang_ those on the lower part. [Ch][Ch] _feng-huang_
is the name of a fabulous bird, _feng_ being the male, and _kuang_ the
female. In another very large class of expressions, the first word
serves to limit and determine the special meaning of the second:
[Ch][Ch] "milk-skin," "cream"; [Ch][Ch] "fire-leg," "ham"; [Ch][Ch]
"lamp-cage," "lantern"; [Ch][Ch] "sea-waist," "strait." There are,
besides, a number of phrases which are harder to classify. Thus, [Ch]
_hu_ means "tiger." But in any case where ambiguity might arise,
_lao-hu_, "old tiger," is used instead of the monosyllable. [Ch]
(another _hu_) is "fox," and [Ch] _li_, an animal belonging to the
smaller cat tribe. Together, _hu-li_, they form the usual term for fox.
[Ch][Ch] _chih tao_ is literally "to know the way," but has come to be
used simply for the verb "to know." These pairs or two-word phrases are
of such frequent occurrence, that the Chinese spoken language might
almost be described as bi-syllabic. Something similar is seen in the
extensive use of suffixes or enclitics, attached to many of the
commonest nouns. [Ch] _nue_ is the word for "girl," but in speech
[Ch][Ch] _nue-tz[)u]_ or [Ch][Ch] _nue-'rh_ is the form used. [Ch] and
[Ch] both mean child, and must originally have been diminutives. A
fairly close parallel is afforded by the German suffix _chen_, as in
_Maedchen_. The suffix [Ch], it may be remarked, belongs especially to
the Peking vernacular. Then, the use of so-called numeratives will often
give some sort of clue as to the class of objects in which a substantive
may be found. When in pidgin English we speak of "one piecee man" or
"three piecee dollar," the word _piecee_ is simply a Chinese numerative
in English dress. Even in ordinary English, people do not say "four
cattle" but "four _head_ of cattle." But in Chinese the use of
numeratives is quite a distinctive feature of the language. The
commonest of them, [Ch] _ko_, can be used indifferently in connexion
with almost any class of things, animal, vegetable or mineral. But there
are other numeratives--at least 20 or 30 in everyday use--which are
strictly reserved for limited classes of things with specific
attributes. [Ch] _mei_, for instance, is the numerative of circular
objects such as coins and rings; [Ch] _k'o_ of small globular
objects--pearls, grains of rice, &c.; [Ch] _k'ou_ classifies things
which have a mouth--bags, boxes and so forth; [Ch] _chien_ is used of
all kinds of affairs; [Ch] _chang_ of chairs and sheets of paper; [Ch]
_chih_ (literally half a pair) is the numerative for various animals,
parts of the body, articles of clothing and ships; [Ch] _pa_ for things
which are grasped by a handle, such as fans and knives.
This by no means exhausts the list of devices by which the difficulties
of a monosyllabic language are successfully overcome. Mention need only
be made, however, of the system of "tones," which, as the most curious
and important of all, has been kept for the last.
The tones.
The tones may be defined as regular modulations of the voice by means of
which different inflections can be imparted to the same sound. They may
be compared with the half-involuntary modulations which express
emotional feeling in our words. To the foreign ear, a Chinese sentence
spoken slowly with the tones clearly brought out has a certain sing-song
effect. If we speak of the tones as a "device" adopted in order to
increase the number of vocables, this must be understood rather as a
convenient way of explaining their practical function than as a
scientific account of their origin. It is absurd to suppose the tones
were deliberately invented in order to fit each written character with a
separate sound. A tone may be said to be as much an integral part of the
word to which it belongs as the sound itself; like the sound, too, it is
not fixed once and for all, but is in a constant, though very gradual,
state of evolution. This fact is proved by the great differences of
intonation in the dialects. Theoretically, four tones have been
distinguished--the even, the rising, the sinking and the entering--each
of which falls again into an upper and a lower series. But only the
Cantonese dialect possesses all these eight varieties of tone (to which
a ninth has been added), while Pekingese, with which we are especially
concerned here, has no more than four: the even upper, the even lower,
the rising and the sinking. The history of the tones has yet to be
written, but it appears that down to the 3rd century B.C. the only tones
distinguished were the [Ch] "even," [Ch] "rising" and [Ch] "entering."
Between that date and the 4th century A.D. the [Ch] sinking tone was
developed. In the 11th century the even tone was divided into upper and
lower, and a little later the entering tone finally disappeared from
Pekingese. The following monosyllabic dialogue gives a very fair idea of
the quality of the four Pekingese tones--_1st tone_: Dead (spoken in a
raised monotone, with slightly plaintive inflection); _2nd tone_: Dead?
(simple query); _3rd tone_: Dead? (an incredulous query long drawn out);
_4th tone_: Dead! (a sharp and decisive answer). The native learns the
tones unconsciously and by ear alone. For centuries their existence was
unsuspected, the first systematic classification of them being
associated with the name of Shen Yo, a scholar who lived A.D. 441-513.
The Emperor Wu Ti was inclined to be sceptical, and one day said to him:
"Come, tell me, what are these famous four tones?" "They are
[Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] whatever your Majesty pleases to make them," replied
Shen Yo, skilfully selecting for his answer four words which
illustrated, and in the usual order, the four tones in question.
Although no native is ever taught the tones separately, they are none
the less present in the words he utters, and must be acquired
consciously or unconsciously by any European who wishes to be
understood. It is a mistake, however, to imagine that every single word
in a sentence must necessarily be given its full tonic force. Quite a
number of words, such as the enclitics mentioned above, are not
intonated at all. In others the degree of emphasis depends partly on the
tone itself, partly on its position in the sentence. In Pekingese the
3rd tone (which is really the second in the ordinary series, the 1st
being subdivided into upper and lower) is particularly important, and
next to it in this respect comes the 2nd (that is, the lower even, or
2nd division of the 1st). It may be said, roughly, that any speaker
whose second and third tones are correct will at any rate be understood,
even if the 1st and 4th are slurred over.
The characters.
Pictorial characters.
It is chiefly, however, on its marvellous script and the rich treasures
of its literature that the Chinese language depends for its unique
fascination and charm. If we take a page of printed Chinese or carefully
written manuscript and compare it with a page, say, of Arabic or
Sanskrit, the Chinese is seen at once to possess a marked characteristic
of its own. It consists of a number of wholly independent units, each of
which would fit into a small square, and is called a character. These
characters are arranged in columns, beginning on the right-hand side of
the page and running from top to bottom. They are _words_, inasmuch as
they stand for articulate sounds expressing root-ideas, but they are
unlike our words in that they are not composed of alphabetical elements
or letters. Clearly, if each character were a distinct and arbitrarily
constructed symbol, only those gifted with exceptional powers of memory
could ever hope to read or write with fluency. This, however, is far
from being the case. If we go to work synthetically and first see how
the language is built up, it will soon appear that most Chinese
characters are susceptible of some kind of analysis. We may accept as
substantially true the account of native writers who tell us that means
of communication other than oral began with the use of knotted cords,
similar to the _quippus_ of ancient Mexico and Peru, and that these were
displaced later on by the practice of notching or scoring rude marks on
wood, bamboo and stone. It is beyond question that the first four
numerals, as written with simple horizontal strokes, date from this
early period. Notching, however, carries us but a little way on the road
to a system of writing, which in China, as elsewhere, must have sprung
originally from pictures. In Chinese writing, especially, the
indications of such an origin are unmistakable, a few characters,
indeed, even in their present form, being perfectly recognizable as
pictures of objects pure and simple. Thus, for "sun" the ancient Chinese
drew a circle with a dot in it: [Ch], now modified into [Ch]; for "moon"
[Ch], now [Ch]; for "God" they drew the anthropomorphic figure [Ch],
which in its modern form appears as [Ch]; for "mountains" [Ch], now [Ch];
for "child" [Ch], now [Ch]; for "fish" [Ch], now [Ch]; for "mouth" a
round hole, now [Ch]; for "hand" [Ch], now [Ch]; for "well" [Ch], now
written without the dot. Hence we see that while the origin of all
writing is pictographic, in Chinese alone of living languages certain
pictures have survived, and still denote what they had denoted in the
beginning. In the script of other countries they were gradually
transformed into hieroglyphic symbols, after which they either
disappeared altogether or became further conventionalized into the
letters of an alphabet. These picture-characters, then, accumulated
little by little, until they comprised all the common objects which
could be easily and rapidly delineated--sun, moon, stars, various
animals, certain parts of the body, tree, grass and so forth, to the
number of two or three hundred. The next step was to a few compound
pictograms which would naturally suggest themselves to primitive man:
[Ch] the sun just above the horizon = "dawn"; [Ch] trees side by side =
"a forest"; [Ch] a mouth with something solid coming out of it = "the
tongue"; [Ch] a mouth with vapor or breath coming out of it = "words."
Suggestive compounds.
Phonetic characters.
But a purely pictographic script has its limitations. The more complex
natural objects hardly come within its scope; still less the whole body
of abstract ideas. While writing was still in its infancy, it must have
occurred to the Chinese to join together two or more pictorial
characters in order that their association might suggest to the mind
some third thing or idea. "Sun" and "moon" combined in this way make the
character [Ch], which means "bright"; woman and child make [Ch] "good";
"fields" and "strength" (that is, labour in the fields) produce the
character [Ch] "male"; two "men" on "earth" [Ch] signifies "to
sit"--before chairs were known; the "sun" seen through "trees" [Ch]
designates the east; [Ch] has been explained as (1) a "pig" under a
"roof," the Chinese idea, common to the Irish peasant, of home, and also
(2) as "several persons" under "a roof," in the same sense; a "woman"
under a "roof" makes the character [Ch] "peace"; "words" and "tongue"
[Ch] naturally suggest "speech"; two hands ([Ch], in the old form [Ch])
indicate friendship; "woman" and "birth" [Ch] = "born of a woman," means
"clan-name," showing that the ancient Chinese traced through the mother
and not through the father. Interesting and ingenious as many of these
combinations are, it is clear that their number, too, must in any
practical system of writing be severely limited. Hence it is not
surprising that this class of characters, correctly called ideograms, as
representing ideas and not objects, should be a comparatively small one.
Up to this point there seemed to be but little chance of the written
language reaching a free field for expansion. It had run so far on lines
sharply distinct from those of ordinary speech. There was nothing in the
character _per se_ which gave the slightest clue to the sound of the
word it represented. Each character, therefore, had to be learned and
recognized by a separate effort of memory. The first step in a new, and,
as it ultimately proved, the right direction, was the borrowing of a
character already in use to represent another word identical in sound,
though different in meaning. Owing to the scarcity of vocables noted
above, there might be as many as ten different words in common use, each
pronounced _fang_. Out of those ten only one, we will suppose, had a
character assigned to it--namely [Ch] "square" (originally said to be a
picture of two boats joined together). But among the other nine was
_fang_, meaning "street" or "locality," in such common use that it
became necessary to have some means of writing it. Instead of inventing
an altogether new character, as they might have done, the Chinese took
[Ch] "square" and used it also in the sense of "locality." This was a
simple expedient, no doubt, but one that, applied on a large scale,
could not but lead to confusion. The corresponding difficulty which
presented itself in speech was overcome, as we saw, by many devices, one
of which consisted in prefixing to the word in question another which
served to determine its special meaning. A native does not say _fang_
simply when he wishes to speak of a place, but _li-fang_ "earth-place."
Exactly the same device was now adopted in writing the character. To
_fang_ "square" was added another part meaning "earth," in order to show
that the _fang_ in question had to do with location on the earth's
surface. The whole character thus appeared as [Ch]. Once this phonetic
principle had been introduced, all was smooth sailing, and writing
progressed by leaps and bounds. Nothing was easier now than to provide
signs for the other words pronounced _fang_. "A room" was [Ch]
door-_fang_; "to spin" was [Ch] silk-_fang_; "fragrant" was [Ch]
herbs-_fang_; "to inquire" was [Ch] words-_fang_; "an embankment," and
hence "to guard against," was [Ch] mound-_fang_; "to hinder" was [Ch]
woman-_fang_. This last example may seem a little strange until we
remember that man must have played the principal part in the development
of writing, and that from the masculine point of view there is something
essentially obstructive and unmanageable in woman's nature. It may be
remarked, by the way, that the element "woman" is often the
determinative in characters that stand for unamiable qualities, e.g.
[Ch][Ch] "jealous," [Ch][Ch] "treacherous," [Ch] "false" and [Ch]
"uncanny." This class of characters, which constitutes at least
nine-tenths of the language, has received the convenient name of
_phonograms_. It must be added that the formation of the phonogram or
phonetic compound did not always proceed along such simple lines as in
the examples given above, where both parts are pictorial characters, one
the "phonetic," representing the sound, and the other, commonly known as
the "radical," giving a clue to the sense. In the first place, most of
the phonetics now existing are not simple pictograms, but themselves
more or less complex characters made up in a variety of ways. On
analysing, for instance, the word [Ch] _hsuen_, "to withdraw," we find it
is composed of the phonetic [Ch] combined with the radical [Ch], an
abbreviated form of [Ch] "to walk." But [Ch] _sun_ means "grandson," and
is itself a suggestive compound made up of the two characters [Ch] "a
son" and [Ch] "connect." The former character is a simple pictogram, but
the latter is again resolvable into the two elements [Ch] "a down stroke
to the left" and [Ch] "a strand of silk," which is here understood to be
the radical and appears in its ancient form as [Ch], a picture of
cocoons spun by the silkworm. Again, the sound is in most cases given by
no means exactly by the so-called phonetic, a fact chiefly due to the
pronunciation having undergone changes which the written character was
incapable of recording. Thus, we have just seen that the phonetic of
[Ch] is not _hsuen_ but _sun_. There are extreme cases in which a
phonetic provides hardly any clue at all as to the sound of its
derivatives. The character [Ch], for example, which by itself is
pronounced _ch'ien_, appears in combination as the modern phonetic of
[Ch] _k'an_, [Ch] _juan_, [Ch] _yin_ and [Ch] _ch'ui_; though in the
last instance it was not originally the phonetic but the radical of a
character which was analysed as [Ch] _ch'ien_, "to emit breath" from
[Ch] "the mouth," the whole character being a suggestive compound rather
than an illustration of radical and phonetic combined. In general,
however, it may be said that the "final" or rhyme is pretty accurately
indicated, while in not a few cases the phonetic does give the exact
sound for all its derivatives. Thus, the characters in which the element
[Ch] enters are pronounced _chien, ch'ien, hsien_ and _lien_; but [Ch]
and its derivatives are all _i_. A considerable number of phonetics are
nearly or entirely obsolete as separate characters, although their
family of derivatives may be a very large one. [Ch], for instance, is
never seen by itself, yet [Ch], [Ch], and [Ch] are among the most
important characters in the language. Objections have been raised in
some quarters to this account of the phonetic development of Chinese. It
is argued that the primitives and sub-primitives, whereby is meant any
character which is capable of entering into combination with another,
have really had some influence on the meaning, and do not merely possess
a phonetic value. But insufficient evidence has hitherto been advanced
in support of this view.
The whole body of Chinese characters, then, may conveniently be divided
up, for philological purposes, into pictograms, ideograms and
phonograms. The first are pictures of objects, the second are composite
symbols standing for abstract ideas, the third are compound characters
of which the more important element simply represents a spoken sound. Of
course, in a strict sense, even the first two classes do not directly
represent either objects or ideas, but rather stand for sounds by which
these objects and ideas have previously been expressed. It may, in fact,
be said that Chinese characters are "nothing but a number of more or
less ingenious devices for suggesting spoken words to a reader." This
definition exposes the inaccuracy of the popular notion that Chinese is
a language of ideographs, a mistake which even the compilers of the
_Oxford English Dictionary_ have not avoided. Considering that all the
earliest characters are pictorial, and that the vast majority of the
remainder are constructed on phonetic principles, it is absurd to speak
of Chinese characters as "symbolizing the idea of a thing, without
expressing the name of it."