WESTERN CHRISTIAN ADVOCATE

January 13, 1875

BY REV. A. STRITMATTER

It has been said that after a foreigner has devoted ten years to the study of the Chinese language, he may then profess to know something about it, but not before. Hence, it would be unspeakably presumptuous for the writer, after only six month's application to set up any pretensions as a sinologue; and he does not propose, in this article, to tell how much he knows about the language, but simply how little.

The student who sits down for the first time to the study of Chinese, finds before him column after column of meaningless characters, apparently no two alike, and of every variety of shape imaginable. (The reader has very likely seen some of them on the tea boxes sent to America.) He learns that every one of these characters has a name, and is the symbol of an idea. With a native teacher by his side, he begins to go over the columns, mimicking his instructor to the best of his ability in trying to give the name which is attached to each character. Some of these names he finds quite easy to pronounce; but many of them can be represented by no possible English orthography, and his vocal organs require very dexterous management in order to produce them correctly. His teacher readily detects shades of difference in intonation to which his own ear is insensible; and if he is of a hasty temper, he soon falls out with poor Sing Li because the latter isn't satisfied when he pronounces a word exactly as he is told to do. But as he progresses, and learns that a slight variation in the sound of a word often produces a decided difference in the meaning, he becomes more careful, and trains his ear to detect all those little differences, of which he was at first unconscious, and Sing Li gets the credit which is rightfully due him as a clever teacher.

As he studies those endless columns day after day, he soon learns to recognize a character when it is repeated, and a feeling of triumph thrills through him when he succeeds in translating the first Chinese sentence. He also is delighted to find what he had never anticipated -- that there is an order and regularity in the formation of those characters that is really charming. They are not a mere medley of strokes and points, huddled together at random; their construction is often an index to their meaning, and they may all be reduced to one harmonious system. There are two hundred and fourteen of the most simple of them, which form the radicals or roots from which all the others are derived. These two hundred and fourteen radicals bear no correspondence whatever to the English alphabet, but simply furnish a basis for classifying the thirty thousand or forty thousand characters that are to be found in Chinese literature. The radicals themselves are arranged in seventeen divisions, corresponding to the number of strokes of the pen required to form them respectively. In compiling a dictionary of the language the radicals are given in order, from one stroke to seventeen, and along with each radical all the characters (if any) that are classed under it. In some dictionaries this arrangement is pursued throughout the body of the work, but in that recently prepared by Dr. R. S.

Maclay and Rev. O. C. Baldwin, and which is most generally used by missionaries, the characters are arranged alphabetically, as far as English orthography can represent them in the Foochow dialect. The last eighty seven pages form an index to the whole work containing a list of all the characters used (some ten thousand), arranged under their respective radicals, with the number of the page on which each one is found. By close inspection it will be found that nearly every character is really a combination of two or more radicals; but an experienced eye can easily determine under which radical it is classed. The part appended to this radical, and which usually makes up the body of the character is termed the phonetic.

So the Chinese student soon learns to analyze a character and to separate it into its radical and phonetic. Then, in order to find it in the dictionary, he turns to the radical to which it belongs. Very probably there are hundreds of other characters placed under that same radical; but as they are arranged according to the number of strokes in the phonetic, and this number is always given in the table, the task of finding any particular character is not so laborious as it might seem. Having ascertained the number of strokes in the phonetic, he knows exactly where to look for it, and finds it with but little effort.

All this is very easy, at least comparatively speaking; for the real difficulty the student finds is in memorizing the characters, in learning to give the tones correctly, and in mastering the queer and numberless phrases and idioms of the language. Some of these idioms are very peculiar, and a strictly literal translation of most Chinese sentences would be simply unintelligible. It is next to impossible to reduce the language to any system of grammer. For words become nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., according to their position in a sentence; and such a thing as inflection or conjugation is unknown. One would think that as there are so many thousands of characters, and each is supposed to represent a mental idea, it would be sufficient if it represented but one alone. But the number and variety of meanings a single character may have is really bewildering. Take, for instance, the character Kuan, which, by the way, has two other forms, and to which the following list of definitions is given in Maclay and Baldwin's Dictionary: "To shut or bar a door; to stop up a doorway; to fasten, to fix, to stop a thing for a while; the cross-bar of a door; a gateway to a market; a frontier pass; a place where goods enter, a custom-house; a post-house; a limit, a line, a boundary, both literally and metaphorically; to bear upon, to effect, to have a relation to, to belong to, to concern; to allude to, to involve; consequences, results; to pass through or by the way of; to pierce, to penetrate; a surname." Now the question is, which of these meanings does this very versatile character have in any particular passage!

With an illustration of one form of Chinese idioms, I shall bring this article to a close. A large number of English substantives, chiefly, abstract nouns, are rendered by a combination of opposites. Size is expressed by "large, small;" weight by "light, heavy;" distance by "far, near;" quality by "good, bad;" trade by "buy, sell;" conduct by "going, standing still." And perhaps the most remarkable instance is in the well-known combination of tung-hsi, two words signifying respectively east and west, and which is exactly equivalent to our very convenient Anglo-Saxon word thing.