Part 41

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] _fêng-huang_ is the name of a fabulous bird, _fêng_ 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] _nü_ is the word for "girl," but in speech [Ch][Ch] _nü-tz[)u]_ or [Ch][Ch] _nü-'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 _Mädchen_. 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 Shên 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 Shên 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] _hsün_, "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 _hsün_ 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."

The "Six Scripts."

The Chinese themselves have always been diligent students of their written language, and at a very early date (probably many centuries B.C.) evolved a sixfold classification of characters, the so-called [Ch][Ch] _liu shu_, very inaccurately translated by the Six Scripts, which may be briefly noticed:--

1. [Ch][Ch] _chih shih_, indicative or self-explanatory characters. This is a very small class, including only the simplest numerals and a few others such as [Ch] "above" and [Ch] "below."

2. [Ch][Ch] _hsiang hsing_, pictographic characters.

3. [Ch][Ch] _hsing shêng_ or [Ch][Ch] _hsieh shêng_, phonetic compounds.

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.