PURCHAS HIS PILGRIMES
one Diphthong, to speake after our manner; for they have not Consonants nor Vowels, but divers Characters for so many things, and as many of them, as there are Words, so that a Word, Syllable, Letter, are the same; and when we joyne divers Syllables to make one Word, it is after our fashion, because they signifie the same thing; with them each Syllable is a severall word. And although the number of things and Characters seeme the same, yet doe they so compound them together, that they exceed not 70000. Characters seventy or eighty thousand: and hee which knoweth ten thousand of them, hath the most necessary: to know all is in manner for any one man impossible. Of these Characters the sound is often the same, the figure and signification differing: so that no Language is so equivocall; nor can any Speech bee written from the Speakers mouth by the Hearer, nor can a Booke bee read to the Hearers understanding, except they have the Booke Equivocations. before them, by their eyes to distinguish the equivocations which their eares cannot. Yea, in speaking accuratly, the Hearer often understands not without repetition and writing either with Inke, or water on the Table, or forming the Characters in the aire; and this most happens in the most elegant and polite discourses (the stile of Bookes and Inkhorne-dialect of their learned, wholly differing from the vulgar Idiome.) This equivocation and paucity Five Accents. of sounds is in some sort eased by Accents, which are five, and not easie to distinguish; by which of one Syllable (as wee account it) they make it with differing tones five fold in differing signification: and there is no Word which is Hardnesse of China Speech. not pronounced with one of these Accents. Hence is the Language so difficult as none else in the World for Strangers to learne to speake and understand; which importunate labour of ours hath yet attayned. The reason I conceive to be that they alway have laboured to adorne their writing more then their speech, their Eloquentia sine eloquio. eloquence still consisting in writing and not in pronunciation, as Isocrates is commended amongst the Greekes.
This multitude of Characters, as it is burthensome to422
