November 4, 1875

THE ATHENS MESSENGER

Do you want to know something about the language of the Celestials?

When a foreigner first lands in China and listens to the jabbering of the people whom he finds swarming everywhere, he is apt to become bewildered. Not a single word that he hears seems to bear the slightest resemblance to any language that he has hitherto heard spoken. There is simply an unintelligible jargon of sounds, strung together in utter confusion, and where one word begins or another ends is something which utterly defies his keenest powers of discrimination. After a while, however, if he has the patience and the resolution to apply himself to the task, he begins to distinguish between some of the vocal utterances he hears in conversation, and to learn that such and such words mean so and so. Significantly enough, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the first words he picks up will be those used in driving a bargain. -- "Twenty cash," "sixty cash," "two hundred cash," and forty other phrases of the kind he will hear on the street long before he is able to distinguish by the ear, what is being bought or sold. This being the vocabulary most in use, and easiest to learn, he is soon proficient in it, and perhaps begins to pride himself on his knowledge of Chinese before he can string together a simple sentence of half a dozen words in an intelligible manner.

The total number of words in the Chinese language is unknown, but from the best knowledge that can be obtained on the subject, it seems to bear a fair proportion to the number of people in the Empire, which appears to be infinite. However there are only about 450 different vocal sounds, so that the task of mastering the language is not so stupendous as one might suppose. Still the great majority of these vocal sounds are unknown in the English tongue, and aside from the difficulty of acquiring them, the inflections, aspirations, intonations, etc., are so multitudinous and perplexing, as frequently to drive a foreigner to the verge of distraction. The system of tones which prevails in the Chinese language, is, so far as my knowledge extends, entirely peculiar to it, and is so novel an arrangement that foreigners are sometimes years in learning to comprehend its nature and importance. Almost every word in the language has five different tones (in some Dialects eight), which affect its meaning very sensibly. Indeed the meaning of any word that is used is entirely dependent upon the tone in which it is uttered, and the fact of its being aspirated or not -- this latter distinction corresponding closely to what in Greek is known as the difference between "smooth and middle mutes." A foreigner in attempting to ask for his hat (mao/); is almost certain to use the word for cat (mao\); and so simple a word as ping may be perverted from its signification of bottle, to mean a soldier, a petition, a disease, or the act of betrothing a wife. These changes of meaning are effected by slight differences of intonation, etc., which no uninitiated person is likely to detect. Of course this peculiarity is often the source of amusing mistakes, common to the experience of all tyros in the language. The term dutsai means a Royal Sovereign; but with a very slight variation of tone, its literal rendering would be a hog butcher. In like manner one is apt to confound the term which is universally applied to literary men of a certain degree (the "B. A.'s"), with the colloquial word for Irish potatoes. "Yang ch'wan" may mean either a foreign steamer or a sheep pen, just as the speaker happens to pronounce it. (In all these cases it will be observed how easy it is for an orator unwittingly to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous.) Once in passing along the street, I heard a man behind me use the opprobrious epithet "kwei" -- devil! I turned around to reprove him, when with characteristic shrewdness and effrontery he told me he had said I was "kwei" -- the Hon. So and So! One of our missionaries was discoursing at length in the chapel one day on the devil, the full term used to denote that personage being mo-kwei; one of his hearers, who evidently was not well posted in theological literature, after trying in vain for a long time to imagine what he meant by the word, at last seemed to seize the idea, and turning round to the man behind him said, "Mo kwei -- that's Mei-kwah" (an American) "isn't it?" And he was evidently satisfied that his rendering was correct. One of the most common mistakes into which foreigners are liable to fall, is that of interchanging the words for buy and sell. Both words in Chinese are pronounced exactly like the English word my; and the only distinction between them is that with the former the falling inflection (my\) is invariably used, and with the latter the rising (my/).

Of the vocal sounds in the language, many are easily acquired by foreigners, but there are others to which no system of English orthography can do justice, and which often furnish an exasperating amount of labor to the learner. Some of these sounds are as difficult to imitate as the vocal utterances of the lower orders of creation (to which, by-the-by, they bear no more resemblance than they do to those of the higher); and are only approximately represented by such queer combinations of letters and signs as yuan, ch'uan, jiah, ssu, tsz, ts'z, etc.

The language being almost entirely monosyllabic, and each word having from two or three to twenty different meanings, another, and one of the greatest difficulties in its acquisition arises from this source. A more hopeless state of confusion cannot be imagined than that in which the man finds himself involved who attempts to get the meaning of a Chinese sentence he has caught by analyzing the words of which it is composed. As an instance, suppose a foreigner to be suddenly accosted by his servant with the announcement, "Siao hai tzu t'eu shway." ("The little child has fallen into the water!"). Not comprehending, perhaps, at once the startling significance of the message, he immediately resolves in his mind all the colloquial meanings he can think of which are commonly applied to those separate words. "Siao" means little, but it also means to understand, to imitate, to melt down, to laugh. "Hai" is the word for child, but it is no less often used to denote the sea, or a shoe; and it also means to injure a person. "Tzu" is simply an affix to the word for child, but it would apply equally well to the word for shoe, and besides is the colloquial for the Chinese printed character. "T'eu" means to throw or fall into, but it may also mean to steal, to vomit, to butcher, to daub; and as a noun it is the very word for a head, the earth, a picture, a disciple, or a rabbit. "Shway" is used for water, but it also means taxes, or to sleep, and is also the interrogative pronoun who. It may be imagined what a muddled state of mind the man must be in by the time he gets through analyzing the sentence, and that long before he is ready to put it together again and work his way through to a correct comprehension of the intelligence it contains, the poor innocent is in a fair way of being drowned.

As the language has but few phonetic sounds in common with the English, some odd transformations are made in rendering foreign names into Chinese. Very few would suspect any relationship between the names Ya-paw-law-han and Abraham, and yet that is the nearest a Chinaman can get to the venerated name. John is Yo-han, which approximates the Greek more closely than the English does; and being about the only instance in which there is anything like a resemblance between a Chinese name of a foreigner and the original, it has been appropriately adopted as the universal sobriquet of the race. It may be observed, however, that the Chinese have no such personal appellation among themselves, or anything like it. Melchisedek is metamorphosed into Mah-gec-shee-tah; and this may be taken as a fair example of the transformation of Biblical names, especially the harder ones. The writer was once unfortunate enough to get his name in a Chinese periodical, and his horror may be imagined when he found himself referred to as the Mr. Ssutahleemawtah!

In regard to the general construction of the language, as exhibited in the formation of sentences, it is impossible to convey a clear idea except that it is at direct variance with all the known rules of grammar, and, I may add, with most of the principles of common sense. All the eight Parts of Speech are confounded together, and verbs and nouns, adjectives and adverbs, are mingled together promiscuously, and interchanged according to their position in a sentence. So long as the present written character of the Chinese exists, it will be impossible to reduce the language to any system of grammar. The attempt has been made by sinologues, but their well-meant endeavors have been attended only with the most partial success. As well attempt to make a balky horse conduct himself straight and sober in a pair of narrow shafts, as to lay down a set of rules to guide the heathen Chinee in the delivery of his opinions. An exhaustive treatise on the construction of the Chinese language would contain as much matter as Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. It has been said that after a foreigner has given ten years of study to the language, then he may begin to profess to know something about it. -- There may be little poetry in the remark, but there is certainly a great deal of truth in it. And as, after such an acknowledgment, it would be strange presumption in the writer (a student of only two years' experience instead of ten) to propose to tell how much he knows about the Chinese language, this brief paper must be taken, on the contrary, as an indication of how little he understands of the subject. And with the same understanding, he proposes to devote a future article to the written character and literature of the Chinese.

A.S.