THE CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS
China, whose inertia is being aroused by foreign "pin-pricks," is
the land of arrested developments, and consequently its writing has
remained for probably two thousand years at a rudimentary stage,
furnishing an interesting object-lesson on the early processes of
advance, after the disuse of knotted cords (see p. 43), from the
_Ku-wăn_, or "ancient pictures," to the _Ling-shing_, or "pictures and
sounds." The language has never got beyond the monosyllabic stage; it
has no terminations to denote number, case, tense, mood, or person,
the same word without change of form being used as a noun, verb, or
other "part of speech," so that a sentence can be construed only by
the place of the several words composing it. As Dr. Marshman tersely
puts it, "the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position." For
example, while the root-meaning of _ta_ is "being great," it may, as
a noun, mean "greatness"; as an adjective, "great"; as a verb, "to be
great," or "to make great"; and as an adverb, "greatly." And, moreover,
not only position, but also tone and gesture, contribute to the
interpretation of the spoken language.
[Illustration: Fig. 37.--Chinese Picture-writing and Later Uncial]
The characters fall into six _wen_ or classes:--1, _pictorial_, giving
a picture of the thing itself; 2, _indicative_, _i.e._ designed
by their form and the relation of their parts to suggest the idea
in the mind of their inventor; 3, _composite_, _i.e._ made up of
two characters, the meanings of which blend in the meanings of the
compounds; 4, _inverted_, or, as the term implies, topsy-turvy;
5, _borrowed_, _i.e._ having another meaning attached to them; 6,
_phonetic_, _i.e._ one part indicating the sense and another part
the sound. In Chinese phrase the ideogram is the "mother of meaning"
and the phonogram the "mother of sound." The materials used largely
determine the form which writing takes, and in the modern or cursive
characters which are shown underneath the primitive forms we see the
result of use of the rabbit's-hair pencil of the Chinese scribe.
Respecting the first class, it suffices to say little, because it
explains itself (fig. 37). The sun was drawn as a circle, the moon as
a crescent, a mountain was indicated by three peaks, rain by drops
under an arch, and so forth. But, as has been sufficiently shown,
such devices carry us a very little way; there is no literature
possible under a mere graphic system. The third, or composite class,
is the most interesting as supplying the key to the common idea of
the character represented. Sometimes the characters indicate a dry
humour. A "wife" is denoted by the signs for "female" and "broom,"
a sort of metonymy for a woman's household work; for a male child
the signs "field" and "strength" are used, because he will till the
soil. The Chinese, it will be remembered, are a purely agricultural
people, and the compound for "profit" is "grain" and "a knife." The
characters for "mountain" and "man" signify "hermit"; an "eye" and
"water" mean "tears"; and the verb "to listen" is indicated by an ear
between two doors. The signs for the noonday sun are the "sun" and
"to reign"; "light" as an abstract quality is represented by figures
of the sun and moon placed side by side; a "man" and "two" stand for
mankind; a couple of women stand for "strife," three for "intrigue,"
while a "woman under two trees" means "desire" or "covetousness." But
the inadequacy of these and the other symbols to supply characters
for the demands of a language in which the same sound has to stand
for a multitude of ideas gave rise to the phonetic group, whose
development from picture-writing more or less ideographic took place
many centuries B.C. The primary symbols or combinations of vowels and
consonants number about four hundred and fifty. The variations in tone
in pronouncing these sounds increase the total of monosyllabic words
to be understood by the ear to something over twelve hundred. But the
Chinese dictionaries contain above forty thousand words, and it is the
symbols for each of these which are provided by the phonetic symbols.
These were compound signs, the first character, as shown above, being
a phonogram or sound-word, and the second character a determinative,
_i.e._ ideogram or sense-word. They are, as Professor Whitney says,
"rather an auxiliary language than a reduction of speech to writing."
The sign for "man" has nearly six hundred combinations, all denoting
something relating to man; that for "tree" has about nine hundred,
to indicate various kinds of trees and wood, things made of wood,
and so forth; while, to borrow a concrete example, _pe_, which means
"white," has, with a "tree" prefixed, the meaning of "cypress"; with
the sign for "man" it means "elder brother"; with the sign for "manes"
it means the vital principle that survives death; and so forth. _Chow_
is the Chinese word for "ship," so a picture of a ship stands for the
sound _chow_. But the word _chow_ means several other things, and the
determinative or "key" sign indicates these. "Thus the ship joined with
the sign of water stands for _chow_, 'ripple'; with that of speech
for _chow_, 'loquacity'; with that of fire for _chow_, 'flickering of
flame,' and so on for 'waggon-pole,' 'fluff,' and several other things
which have little in common but the name of _chow_" (Tylor, p. 102).
Although, theoretically, the Chinaman has to make an enormous number of
characters before he can write his own language, so that, at the age
of twenty-five, a diligent student has barely acquired the same amount
of facility in reading and writing which is usually attained by an
English child--using the twenty-six characters of his alphabet--at the
age of ten; practically some four or five thousand characters suffice
for average needs, and the convenience of "a system enabling those who
speak mutually unintelligible idioms, to converse together, using the
pencil instead of the tongue," caused the abandonment of an attempt to
make nearer approach to an alphabetic system which was promoted by the
Chinese Government some centuries ago.
In contrast to this, the Japanese, with that pliability which has
helped to put them in the van of Oriental peoples, selected, as
a result of contact with Buddhism, which came to them by way of
China, certain signs from the wilderness of Chinese characters, and
constituted these as their alphabet or _irofa_ so called, on the
acrologic principle (p. 104), from the names of its first signs, like
our alphabet from _alpha_, _beta_. Their language being polysyllabic,
involved the result that whatever signs were used must be syllabic,
and hence the adoption of a syllabary was easy. But, of course, like
all syllabaries, this has the defect of necessitating the use of that
larger number of signs with which the alphabet dispenses. The origin
of the Japanese syllabaries, of which there are two, dates from the
end of the ninth century of our Lord. One, the Hirakana, derived from
a cursive form of Chinese called the _tsau_ or "grass" character,
contains about three hundred syllabic sound-signs; the other, known as
the Katakana, is derived from the _kyai_ or "model" type of the Chinese
character, and is the simpler of the two in having only a single
character for each of the forty-seven syllabic sounds in the Japanese
language. But neither demands detailed treatment here, since with the
intrusion of the Roman alphabet among Western imports into Japan its
substitution for the cumbrous syllabaries is probably only a matter of
brief time, and the Japanese script may then take its place with the
Maya and the Aztec as a graphic curiosity.
Chinese is the official script of Corea, but the lower classes use
a phonetic alphabet which, in the judgment of some authorities, is
derived from a cursive form of the Nâgari script of India, having, so
it is thought, been introduced by Buddhist teachers. Both past and
present times afford striking examples of the influence of religion in
the diffusion of alphabets, missionaries obviously making use of their
own alphabet in the translation of their sacred books into the language
of their converts. Whatever connection there may have been between
Corean and Indian scripts is not, however, traceable, owing to the
changes in the former. But in truth we know little about the matter,
and there is something to be said in support of an old tradition that
King Se-jo, who reigned five hundred years ago, commanded his chief
grammarian, Song Sammun, to devise an alphabet that should supersede
the cumbersome Chinese; whereupon that scholar took the Tibetan
characters as foundation, but as those were only consonantal, he turned
to the ancient Chinese and transformed six of its simplest radicals
into the Corean vowels, naming the vowels and consonants "mother" and
"child" respectively. The letters were "bunched together" so as to look
like the Chinese characters (fig. 38), the purpose being "to facilitate
the transliteration of the Chinese text in a parallel column." There is
a curious tradition, reminding us of the Chinese legend of the origin
of writing, that the Corean characters were suggested by the straight
and oblique lattice-work of the native doors.
[Illustration: Fig. 38.--Chinese and Tibetan Triglot]