THE CHINESE LANGUAGE.

Taranaki Daily News, 16 December 1922, Page 9

THE CHINESE LANGUAGE.

MOST DIFFICULT IN THE WORLD. China is blessed —or cursed—with perhaps the subtlest, certainly the most difficult, language in the world (writes a correspondent in a London paper 1. The written language, which is oppressively literary, is a different instrument from the spoken, which is delightfully colloquial, with many words which cannot be written, for there are no characters to express them. Moreover, though the written script, in all cases, conveys identical meanings throughout the 17 provinces, the spoken language varies not only from province to province, but also from district to district, and a man may hardly understand another living only a hundred miles away. However, one similarity there is. The colloquial expressions of Northerners or Southerners, Easterners or Westerners, are in nearly all cases alike—they vary only in sound values. The written is a picture language. In the dim, far-off days of its birth, perhaps 10,000 years ago, it began with hieroglyphics serving the same purpose as the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. But as time went on multitudinous combinations appeared. Many think that, because of its lack of a vocabulary and the fact that it is a haphazard one, to be acquired only after a prodigous feat of memory. It is a natural, but a mistaken notion. There are definite roots, and each character has been meticulously “built up,” so that its approximate sense can be seen at a glance from its combination of roots. But to the foreigner the greatest difficulty is the spoken language, because every sound has four distinct tones—even a good ear will at first detect only two—and each tone bears a different meaning, while often a. single tone has more than one meaning. So it is easy to understand the frightful blunders missionaries make even after five years of study. Naturally the colloquial is also a picture language. To take a few examples. There is no mistaking its meaning, for a picture is at once conveyed. To kill is to “strike dead”; to decamp is to “run road.” In Cantonese the word “strike” is used in different combinations to ex-, press at least a hundred things, from war to “tipping.” There is only one way to speak Chinese, of any dialect, properly—and 1 tliat is to be born in China.