4. [Ch][Ch] _hui i_, suggestive compounds based on a natural association
of ideas. To this class alone can the term "ideographs" be properly
applied.
5. [Ch][Ch] _chuan chu_. The meaning of the name has been much disputed,
some saying that it means "turned round"; e.g. [Ch] _mu_ "eye" is now
written [Ch]. Others understand it as comprising a few groups of
characters nearly related in sense, each character consisting of an
element common to the group, together with a specific and detachable
part; e.g. [Ch], [Ch], and [Ch], all of which have the meaning "old."
This class may be ignored altogether, seeing that it is concerned not
with the origin of characters but only with peculiarities in their use.
6. [Ch][Ch] _chia chieh_, borrowed characters, as explained above, that
is, characters adopted for different words simply because of the
identity of sound.
The order of this native classification is not to be taken as in any
sense chronological. Roughly, it may be said that the development of
writing followed the course previously traced--that is, beginning with
indicative signs, and going on with pictograms and ideograms, until
finally the discovery of the phonetic principle did away with all
necessity for other devices in enlarging the written language. But we
have no direct evidence that this was so. There can be little doubt that
phonetic compounds made their appearance at a very early date, probably
prior to the invention of a large number of suggestive compounds, and
perhaps even before the whole existing stock of pictograms had been
fashioned. It is significant that numerous words of daily occurrence,
which must have had a place in the earliest stages of human thought,
are expressed by phonetic characters. We can be fairly certain, at any
rate, that the period of "borrowed characters" did not last very long,
though it is thought that traces of it are to be seen in the habit of
writing several characters, especially those for certain plants and
animals, indifferently with or without their radicals. Thus [Ch][Ch] "a
tadpole" is frequently written [Ch][Ch], without the part meaning
"insect" or "reptile."
Styles of writing.
[Illustration]
In the very earliest inscriptions that have come down to us, the
so-called [Ch][Ch] _ku-wen_ or "ancient figures," all the
above-mentioned forms occur. None are wholly pictorial, with one or
two unimportant exceptions. These early inscriptions are found on
bronzes dating from the half-legendary period extending from the
beginning of the Shang dynasty in the 18th century B.C., or possibly
earlier, down to a point in the reign of King Hsuean of the Chou
dynasty, generally fixed at 827 B.C. They have been carefully
reproduced and for the most part deciphered by painstaking Chinese
archaeologists, and form the subject of many voluminous works. The
following may be taken as a specimen, in which it will be noticed that
only the last character is unmistakably pictorial: This is read:
[Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch]--"Shen made [this] precious _ting_." These ancient
bronzes, which mainly take the shape of bells, cauldrons and
sacrificial utensils, were until within the last decade our sole
source of information concerning the origin and early history of
Chinese writing. But recently a large number of inscribed bone
fragments have been excavated in the north of China, providing new and
unexpected matter for investigation. The inscriptions on these bones
have already furnished a list of nearly 2500 separate characters, of
which not more than about 600 have been so far identified. They appear
to be responses given by professional soothsayers to private
individuals who came to them seeking the aid of divination in the
affairs of their daily life. It is difficult to fix their date with
much exactitude. The script, though less archaic than that of the
earlier bronzes, is nevertheless of an exceedingly free and irregular
type. Judging by the style of the inscriptions alone, one would be
inclined to assign them to the early years of the Chou dynasty, say
1100 B.C. But Mr L.C. Hopkins thinks that they represent a mode of
writing already obsolete at the time of their production, and retained
of set purpose by the diviners from obscurantist motives, much as the
ancient hieroglyphics were employed by the Egyptian priesthood. He
would therefore date them about 500 years later, or only half a
century before the birth of Confucius. If that is so, they are merely
late specimens of the "ancient figures" appearing long after the
latter had made way for a new and more conventionalized form of
writing. This new writing is called in Chinese [Ch] _chuan_, which is
commonly rendered by the word Seal, for the somewhat unscientific
reason that many ages afterwards it was generally adopted for use on
seals. Under the Chou dynasty, however, as well as the two succeeding
it, the meaning of the word was not "seal," but "sinuous curves," as
made in writing. It has accordingly been suggested that this epoch
marks the first introduction into China of the brush in place of the
bamboo or wooden pencil with frayed end which was used with some kind
of colouring matter or varnish. There are many arguments both for and
against this view; but it is unquestionable, at any rate, that the
introduction of a supple implement like the brush at the very time
when the forms of characters were fast becoming crystallized and
fixed, would be sufficient to account for a great revolution in the
style of writing. Authentic specimens of the [Ch][Ch] _ta chuan_,
older or Greater Seal writing, are exceedingly rare. But it is
generally believed that the inscriptions on the famous stone drums,
now at Peking, date from the reign of King Hsuean, and they may
therefore with practical certainty be cited as examples of the Greater
Seal in its original form. These "drums" are really ten roughly
chiselled mountain boulders, which were discovered in the early part
of the 7th century, lying half buried in the ground near Feng-hsiang
Fu in the province of Shensi. On them are engraved ten odes, a
complete ode being cut on each drum, celebrating an Imperial hunting
and fishing expedition in that part of the country. A facsimile of one
of these, taken from an old rubbing and reproduced in Dr Bushell's
_Handbook of Chinese Art_, shows that great strides had been made in
this writing towards symmetry, compactness and conventionalism. The
vogue of the Greater Seal appears to have lasted until the reign of
the First Emperor, 221-210 B.C. (see _History_), when a further
modification took place. For many centuries China had been split up
into a number of practically independent states, and this circumstance
seems to have led to considerable variations in the styles of writing.
Having succeeded in unifying the empire, the First Emperor proceeded,
on the advice of his minister Li Ss[)u], to standardize its script by
ordaining that only the style in use in his own state of Ch'in should
henceforward be employed throughout China. It is clear, then, that
this new style of writing was nothing more than the Greater Seal
characters in the form they had assumed after several centuries of
evolution, with numerous abbreviations and modifications. It was
afterwards known as the [Ch][Ch] _hsiao chuan_, or Lesser Seal, and is
familiar to us from the _Shuo Wen_ dictionary (see _Literature_).
Though a decided improvement on what had gone before, the Lesser Seal
was destined to have but a short career of undisputed supremacy.
Reform was in the air; and something less cumbrous was soon felt to be
necessary by the clerks who had to supply the immense quantity of
written reports demanded by the First Emperor. Thus it came about that
a yet simpler and certainly more artistic form of writing was already
in use, though not universally so, not long after the decree
abolishing the Greater Seal. This [Ch][Ch] _li shu_, or "official
script," as it is called, shows a great advance on the Seal character;
so much so that one cannot help suspecting the traditional account of
its invention. It is perhaps more likely to have been directly evolved
from the Greater Seal. If the Lesser Seal was the script of the
semi-barbarous state of Ch'in, we should certainly expect to find a
more highly developed system of writing in some of the other states.
Unlike the Seal, the _li shu_ is perfectly legible to one acquainted
only with the modern character, from which indeed it differs but in
minor details. How long the Lesser Seal continued to exist side by
side with the _li shu_ is a question which cannot be answered with
certainty. It was evidently quite obsolete, however, at the time of
the compilation of the _Shuo Wen_, about a hundred years after the
Christian era. As for the Greater Seal and still earlier forms of
writing, they were not merely obsolete but had fallen into utter
oblivion before the Han Dynasty was fifty years old. When a number of
classical texts were discovered bricked up in old houses about 150
B.C., the style of writing was considered so singular by the literati
of the period that they refused to believe it was the ordinary ancient
character at all, and nicknamed it _k'o-t'ou shu_, "tadpole
character," from some fancied resemblance in shape. The theory that
these tadpole characters were not Chinese but a species of cuneiform
script, in which the wedges might possibly suggest tadpoles, must be
dismissed as too wildly improbable for serious consideration; but we
may advert for a moment to a famous inscription in which the real
tadpole characters of antiquity are said to appear. This is on a stone
tablet alleged to have been erected on Mount Heng in the modern Hupeh
by the legendary Emperor Yue, as a record of his labours in draining
away the great flood which submerged part of China in the 23rd century
B.C. After more than one fruitless search, the actual monument is said
to have been discovered on a peak of the mountain in A.D. 1212, and a
transcription was made, which may be seen reproduced as a curiosity in
Legge's _Classics_, vol. iii. For several reasons, however, the whole
affair must be regarded as a gross imposture.
Out of the "official script" two other forms were soon developed,
namely the [Ch][Ch] _ts'ao shu_, or "grass character," which so
curtails the usual strokes as to be comparable to a species of
shorthand, requiring special study, and the [Ch][Ch] _hsing shu_ or
running hand, used in ordinary correspondence. Some form of grass
character is mentioned as in use as early as 200 B.C. or thereabouts,
though how nearly it approximated to the modern grass hand it is hard
to say; the running hand seems to have come several centuries later.
The final standardization of Chinese writing was due to the great
calligraphist Wang Hsi-chih of the 4th century, who gave currency to
the graceful style of character known as [Ch][Ch] _k'ai shu_,
sometimes referred to as the "clerkly hand." When block-printing was
invented some centuries later, the characters were cut on this model,
which still survives at the present day. It is no doubt owing to the
early introduction of printing that the script of China has remained
practically unchanged ever since. The manuscript rolls of the T'ang
and preceding dynasties, recently discovered by Dr Stein in Turkestan,
furnish direct evidence of this fact, showing as they do a style of
writing not only clear and legible but remarkably modern in
appearance.
The whole history of Chinese writing, then, is characterized by a slow
progressive development which precludes the idea of sharply-marked
divisions between one period and another. The Chinese themselves,
however, have canonized quite a series of alleged inventors, starting
from Fu Hsi, a mythical emperor of the third millennium B.C., who is
said to have developed a complete system of written characters from
the markings on the back of a dragon-horse; hence, by the way, the
origin of the dragon as an Imperial emblem. As a rule, the credit of
the invention of the art of writing is given to Ts'ang Chieh, a being
with fabulous attributes, who conceived the idea of a written language
from the markings of birds' claws upon the sand. The diffusion of the
Greater Seal script is traced to a work in fifteen chapters published
by Shih Chou, historiographer in the reign of King Hsuean. The Lesser
Seal, again, is often ascribed to Li Ss[)u] himself, whereas the
utmost he can have done in the matter was to urge its introduction
into common use. Likewise, Ch'eng Mo, of the 3rd century B.C., is
supposed to have invented the _li shu_ while in prison, and one
account attributes the Lesser Seal to him as well; but the fact is
that the whole history of writing, as it stands in Chinese authors, is
in hopeless confusion.
_Grammar._--When about to embark on the study of a foreign language, the
student's first thought is to provide himself with two indispensable
aids--a dictionary and a grammar. The Chinese have found no difficulty
in producing the former (see _Literature_). Now what as to the grammar?
He might reasonably expect a people so industrious in the cultivation of
their language to have evolved some system of grammar which to a certain
degree would help to smooth his path. And yet the contrary is the case.
No set of rules governing the mutual relations of words has ever been
formulated by the Chinese, apparently because the need of such rules has
never been felt. The most that native writers have done is to draw a
distinction between [Ch][Ch] and [Ch][Ch] "full" and "empty words,"
respectively, the former being subdivided into [Ch][Ch] "living words"
or verbs, and [Ch][Ch] "dead words" or noun-substantives. By "empty
words" particles are meant, though sometimes the expression is loosely
applied to abstract terms, including verbs. The above meagre
classification is their nearest approach to a conception of grammar in
our sense. This in itself does not prove that a Chinese grammar is
impossible, nor that, if constructed, it might not be helpful to the
student. As a matter of fact, several attempts have been made by
foreigners to deduce a grammatical system which should prove as rigid
and binding as those of Western languages, though it cannot be said that
any as yet has stood the test of time or criticism. Other writers have
gone to the other extreme, and maintained that Chinese has no grammar at
all. In this dictum, exaggerated as it sounds, there is a very
substantial amount of truth. Every Chinese character is an indivisible
unit, representing a sound and standing for a root-idea. Being free from
inflection or agglutination of any kind, it is incapable of indicating
in itself either gender, number or case, voice, mood, tense or person.
Of European languages, English stands nearest to Chinese in this
respect, whence it follows that the construction of a hybrid jargon like
pidgin English presents fewer difficulties than would be the case, for
instance, with pidgin German. For pidgin English simply consists in
taking English words and treating them like Chinese characters, that is,
divesting them of all troublesome inflections and reducing them to a set
of root-ideas arranged in logical sequence. "You wantchee my no
wantchee" is nothing more nor less than literally rendered Chinese:
[Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] "Do you want me or not?" But we may go further, and
say that no Chinese character can be definitely regarded as being any
particular part of speech or possessing any particular function
absolutely, apart from the general tenor of its context. Thus, taken
singly, the character [Ch] conveys only the general idea "above" as
opposed to "below." According to its place in the sentence and the
requirements of common sense, it may be a noun meaning "upper person"
(that is, a ruler); an adjective meaning "upper," "topmost" or "best";
an adverb meaning "above"; a preposition meaning "upon"; and finally a
verb meaning "to mount upon," or "to go to." [Ch] is a character that
may usually be translated "to enter" as in [Ch][Ch] "to enter a door";
yet in the locution [Ch][Ch] "enter wood," the verb becomes causative,
and the meaning is "to put into a coffin." It would puzzle grammarians
to determine the precise grammatical function of any of the words in the
following sentence, with the exception of [Ch] (an interrogative, by the
way, which here happens to mean "why" but in other contexts is
equivalent to "how," "which" or "what"): [Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] "Affair why
must ancient," or in more idiomatic English, "Why necessarily stick to
the ways of the ancients in such matters?" Or take a proverbial saying
like [Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch], which may be correctly rendered "The less
a man has seen, the more he has to wonder at." It is one thing, however,
to translate it correctly, and another to explain how this translation
can be inferred from the individual words, of which the bald equivalents
might be given as: "Few what see, many what Strange." To say that
"strange" is the literal equivalent of [Ch] does not mean that [Ch] can
be definitely classed as an adjective. On the other hand, it would be
dangerous even to assert that the word here plays the part of an active
verb, because it would be equally permissible to translate the above
"Many things are strange to one who has seen but little."
Chinese grammar, then, so far as it deals with the classification of
separate words, may well be given up as a bad job. But there still
remains the art of syntax, the due arrangement of words to form
sentences according to certain established rules. Here, at any rate,
we are on somewhat firmer ground; and for many years the dictum that
"the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position" was regarded as a
golden key to the written language of China. It is perfectly true that
there are certain positions and collocations of words which tend to
recur, but when one sits down to formulate a set of hard-and-fast
rules governing these positions, it is soon found to be a thankless
task, for the number of qualifications and exceptions which will have
to be added is so great as to render the rule itself valueless.
[Ch][Ch] means "on a horse," [Ch][Ch] "to get on a horse." But it will
not do to say that a preposition becomes a verb when placed before the
substantive, as many other prepositions come before and not after the
words they govern. If we meet such a phrase as [Ch][Ch], literally
"warn rebels," we must not mentally label [Ch] as a verb and [Ch] as a
substantive, and say to ourselves that in Chinese the verb is followed
immediately by its object. Otherwise, we might be tempted to
translate, "to warn the rebels," whereas a little reflection would
show us that the conjunction of "warning" and "rebels" naturally leads
to the meaning "to warn (the populace or whoever it may be) _against_
the rebels." After all our adventurous incursions into the domain of
syntax, we are soon brought back to the starting-point and are obliged
to confess that each particular passage is best interpreted on its own
merits, by the logic of the context and the application of common
sense. There is no reason why Chinese sentences should not be
dissected, by those who take pleasure in such operations, into
subject, copula and predicate, but it should be early impressed upon
the beginner that the profit likely to accrue to him therefrom is
infinitesimal. As for fixed rules of grammatical construction, so far
from being a help, he will find them a positive hindrance. It should
rather be his aim to free his mind from such trammels, and to accustom
himself to look upon each character as a root-idea, not a definite
part of speech.
_The Book Language._--Turning now to some of the more salient
characteristics of the book language, with the object of explaining how
it came to be so widely separated from common speech, we might
reasonably suppose that in primitive times the two stood in much closer
relation to each other than now. But it is certainly a striking fact
that the earliest literary remains of any magnitude that have come down
to us should exhibit a style very far removed from any possible
colloquial idiom. The speeches of the Book of History (see _Literature_)
are more manifestly fictitious, by many degrees, than the elaborate
orations in Thucydides and Livy. If we cannot believe that Socrates
actually spoke the words attributed to him in the dialogues of Plato,
much less can we expect to find the _ipsissima verba_ of Confucius in
any of his recorded sayings. In the beginning, all characters doubtless
represented spoken words, but it must very soon have dawned on the
practical Chinese mind that there was no need to reproduce in writing
the bisyllabic compounds of common speech. _Chien_ "to see," in its
written form [Ch], could not possibly be confused with any other
_chien_, and it was therefore unnecessary to go to the trouble of
writing [Ch][Ch] _k'an-chien_ "look-see," as in colloquial. There was a
wonderful outburst of literary activity in the Confucian era, when it
would seem that the older and more cumbrous form of Seal character was
still in vogue. If the mere manual labour of writing was so great, we
cannot wonder that all superfluous particles or other words that could
be dispensed with were ruthlessly cut away. So it came about that all
the old classical works were composed in the tersest of language, as
remote as can be imagined from the speech of the people. The passion for
brevity and conciseness was pushed to an extreme, and resulted more
often than not in such obscurity that detailed commentaries on the
classics were found to be necessary, and have always constituted an
important branch of Chinese literature. After the introduction of the
improved style of script, and when the mechanical means of writing had
been simplified, it may be supposed that literary diction also became
freer and more expansive. This did happen to some extent, but the
classics were held in such veneration as to exercise the profoundest
influence over all succeeding schools of writers, and the divorce
between literature and pooular speech became permanent and
irreconcilable. The book language absorbed all the interest and energy
of scholars, and it was inevitable that this elevation of the written
should be accompanied by a corresponding degradation of the spoken word.
This must largely account for the somewhat remarkable fact that the art
of oratory and public speaking has never been deemed worthy of
cultivation in China, while the comparatively low position occupied by
the drama may also be referred to the same cause. At the same time, the
term "book language," in its widest sense, covers a multitude of styles,
some of which differ from each other nearly as much as from ordinary
speech. The department of fiction (see _Literature_), which the lettered
Chinaman affects to despise and will not readily admit within the
charmed circle of "literature," really constitutes a bridge spanning the
gulf between the severer classical style and the colloquial; while an
elegant terseness characterises the higher-class novel, there are others
in which the style is loose and shambling. Still, it remains true that
no book of any first-rate literary pretensions would be easily
intelligible to any class of Chinamen, educated or otherwise, if read
aloud exactly as printed. The public reader of stories is obliged to
translate, so to speak, into the colloquial of his audience as he goes
along. There is no inherent reason why the conversation of everyday life
should not be rendered into characters, as is done in foreign handbooks
for teaching elementary Chinese; one can only say that the Chinese do
not think it worth while. There are a few words, indeed, which, though
common enough in the mouths of genteel and vulgar alike, have positively
no characters to represent them. On the other hand, there is a vast
store of purely book words which would never be used or understood in
conversation.
The book language is not only nice in its choice of words, it also has
to obey special rules of construction. Of these, perhaps the most
apparent is the carefully marked antithesis between characters in
different clauses of a sentence, which results in a kind of parallelism
or rhythmic balance. This parallelism is a noticeable feature in
ordinary poetical composition, and may be well illustrated by the
following four-line stanza:
"[Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] The bright sun completes its course behind the
mountains; [Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] The yellow river flows away into the
sea. [Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] Would you command a prospect of a thousand
_li_? [Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] Climb yet one storey higher." In the first
line of this piece, every single character is balanced by a
corresponding one in the second: [Ch] white by [Ch] yellow, [Ch] sun by
[Ch] river, and so on. In the 3rd and 4th lines, where more laxity is
generally allowed, every word again has its counterpart, with the sole
exception of [Ch] "wish" and [Ch] "further."
The question is often asked: What sort of instrument is Chinese for the
expression of thought? As a medium for the conveyance of historical
facts, subtle emotions or abstruse philosophical conceptions, can it
compare with the languages of the Western world? The answers given to
this question have varied considerably. But it is noteworthy that those
who most depreciate the qualities of Chinese are, generally speaking,
theorists rather than persons possessing a profound first-hand knowledge
of the language itself. Such writers argue that want of inflection in
the characters must tend to make Chinese hard and inelastic, and
therefore incapable of bringing out the finer shades of thought and
emotion. Answering one a priori argument with another, one might fairly
retort that, if anything, flexibility is the precise quality to be
predicated of a language in which any character may, according to the
requirements of the context, be interpreted either as noun, verb or
adjective. But all such reasoning is somewhat futile. It will scarcely
be contended that German, being highly inflected, is therefore superior
in range and power to English, from which inflections have largely
disappeared. Some of the early Jesuit missionaries, men of great natural
ability who steeped themselves in Oriental learning, have left very
different opinions on record. Chinese appeared to them as admirable for
the superabundant richness of its vocabulary as for the conciseness of
its literary style. And among modern scholars there is a decided
tendency to accept this view as embodying a great deal more truth than
the other.
Another question, much debated years ago, which time itself is now
satisfactorily answering, was whether the Chinese language would be able
to assimilate the vast stock of new terminology which closer contact
with the West would necessarily carry with it. Two possible courses, it
seemed, were open: either fresh characters would be formed on the
radical-phonetic principle, or the new idea might be expressed by the
conjunction of two or more characters already existing. The former
expedient had been tried on a limited scale in Japan, where in the
course of time new characters were formed on the same principle as of
old, which were yet purely Japanese and find no place in a Chinese
dictionary. But although the field for such additions was boundless, the
Chinese have all along been chary of extending the language in this way,
probably because these modern terms had no Chinese sound which might
have suggested some particular phonetic. They have preferred to adopt
the other method, of which [Ch][Ch][Ch] (rise-descend-machine) for
"lift," and [Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] (discuss-govern-country-assembly) for
"parliament" are examples. Even a metaphysical abstraction like The
Absolute has been tentatively expressed by [Ch][Ch] (exclude-opposite);
but in this case an equivalent was already existing in the Chinese
language.
A very drastic measure, strongly advocated in some quarters, is the
entire abolition of all characters, to be replaced by their equivalent
sounds in letters of the alphabet. Under this scheme [Ch] would figure
as _jen_ or _ren_, [Ch] as _ma_, and so on. But the proposal has fallen
extremely flat. The vocables, as we have seen, are so few in number that
only the colloquial, if even that, could possibly be transcribed in this
manner. Any attempt to transliterate classical Chinese would result in a
mere jumble of sounds, utterly unintelligible, even with the addition of
tone-marks. There is another aspect of the case. The characters are a
potent bond of union between the different parts of the Empire with
their various dialects. If they should ever fall into disuse, China will
have taken a first and most fatal step towards internal disruption. Even
the Japanese, whose language is not only free from dialects, but
polysyllabic and therefore more suitable for romanization, have utterly
refused to abandon the Chinese script, which in spite of certain
disadvantages has hitherto triumphantly adapted itself to the needs of
civilized intercourse.
See P. Premare, _Notitiae Linguae Sinicae_ (1831); Ma Kien-chung, _Ma
shih wen t'ung_ (1899); L.C. Hopkins, _The Six Scripts_ (1881) and
_The Development of Chinese Writing_ (1910); H.A. Giles, _A
Chinese-English Dictionary_ (2nd ed., 1910). (H. A. GI.; L. GI.)