the application of a single formula of evolution to all varieties of human speech. That the demands of so vast a civilization should have produced so scanty a vocabulary needs some other explanation than a supposed entire dependence on its primitive resources alone.[1]
The Gram-mar not inorganic
Quite as far as the vocables of the Chinese from an inorganic condition, are its grammatical forms. Whether we accept or reject the prediction of Mr. Lay,[2] it will very soon be matter of surprise that any one should ever have doubted the identity of its structure with that of other tongues ; it is certain that in many of its apparent peculiarities this language bears witness to the universality of those logical processes to which we are wont to refer the laws of grammatical science. The use of one word for a great variety of meanings is common in the Sanscrit and Egyptian, and well known to all modern languages. Syntactical forms are
Grammat-ical ex-pedients.
Wanting to thc Chinesc, being represented by the position of words in the sentence, and the tones of the voice. Even if it might seem that delicate shades of feeling and thought were not as expressible by such means as by inflection in other languages, we must remember that the national mind has here created an instrument suited to its own genius, and that it has perhaps left all the more room for the action of such powers as inference and association in interpreting its rigid words. But this is by no means the whole. These expedients of position and tone are well known to linguistic types of a high order. The English readily marks in these ways the
- ↑ Legge says that the language has so changed since the age of the Tcheou that the Shu-king rhymes cannot now be found. Edkins has shown numerous "letter changes" in the pronunciation of the roots, both in ancient and modern times. The actual diversity of dialects in China indicates that the ingenuity of the people expends itself on these transformations rather than on inventing new words.
- ↑ Chinese as they Are, ch. xvii.
