THE CHINESE, JAPANESE, AND COREAN SCRIPTS

China, whose inertia is being aroused by foreign "pin-pricks," is the land of arrested developments, and consequently its writing has remained for probably two thousand years at a rudimentary stage, furnishing an interesting object-lesson on the early processes of advance, after the disuse of knotted cords (see p. 43), from the Ku-wan, or "ancient pictures," to the Ling-shing, or "pictures and sounds." The language has never got beyond the monosyllabic stage; it has no terminations to denote number, case, tense, mood, or person, the same word without change of form being used as a noun, verb, or other "part of speech," so that a sentence can be construed only by the place of the several words composing it. As Dr. Marshman tersely puts it, "the whole of Chinese grammar depends upon position." For example, while the root-meaning of ta is "being great," it may, as a noun, mean "greatness"; as an adjective, "great"; as a verb, "to be great," or "to make great"; and as an adverb, "greatly." And, moreover, not only position, but also tone and gesture, contribute to the interpretation of the spoken language.

The characters fall into six wen or classes:—1, pictorial, giving a picture of the thing itself; 2, indicative, i.e. designed by their form and the relation of their parts to suggest the idea in the mind of their inventor; 3, composite, i.e. made up of two characters, the meanings of which blend in the meanings of the compounds; 4, inverted, or, as the term implies, topsy-turvy; 5, borrowed, i.e. having another meaning attached to them; 6, phonetic, i.e. one part indicating the sense and another part the sound. In Chinese phrase the ideogram is the "mother of meaning" and the phonogram the "mother of sound." The materials used largely determine the form which writing takes, and in the modern or cursive characters which are shown underneath the primitive forms we see the result of use of the rabbit's-hair pencil of the Chinese scribe. Respecting the first class, it suffices to say little, because it explains itself (Fig. 37). The sun was drawn as a circle, the moon as a crescent, a mountain was indicated by three peaks, rain by drops under an arch, and so forth. But, as has been sufficiently shown, such devices carry us a very little way; there is no literature possible under a mere graphic system. The third, or composite class, is the most interesting as supplying the key to the common idea of the character represented. Sometimes the characters indicate a dry humour. A "wife" is denoted by the signs for "female" and "broom," a sort of metonymy for a woman's household work; for a male child the signs "field" and "strength" are used, because he will till the soil. The Chinese, it will be remembered, are a purely agricultural people, and the compound for "profit" is "grain" and "a knife." The characters for "mountain" and "man" signify "hermit"; an "eye" and "water" mean "tears"; and the verb "to listen" is indicated by an ear between two doors. The signs for the noonday sun are the "sun" and "to reign"; "light" as an abstract quality is represented by figures of the sun and moon placed side by side; a "man" and "two" stand for mankind; a couple of women stand for "strife," three for "intrigue," while a "woman under two trees" means "desire" or "covetousness." But the inadequacy of these and the other symbols to supply characters for the demands of a language in which the same sound has to stand for a multitude of ideas gave rise to the phonetic group, whose development from picture-writing more or less ideographic took place many centuries b.c. The primary symbols or combinations of vowels and consonants number about four hundred and fifty. The variations in tone in pronouncing these sounds increase the total of monosyllabic words to be understood by the ear to something over twelve hundred. But the Chinese dictionaries contain above forty thousand words, and it is the symbols for each of these which are provided by the phonetic symbols. These were compound signs, the first character, as shown above, being a phonogram or sound-word, and the second character a determinative, i.e. ideogram or sense-word. They are, as Professor Whitney says, "rather an auxiliary language than a reduction of speech to writing." The sign for "man" has nearly six hundred combinations, all denoting something relating to man; that for "tree" has about nine hundred, to indicate various kinds of trees and wood, things made of wood, and so forth; while, to borrow a concrete example, pe, which means "white," has, with a "tree" prefixed, the meaning of "cypress"; with the sign for "man" it means "elder brother"; with the sign for "manes" it means the vital principle that survives death; and so forth. Chow is the Chinese word for "ship," so a picture of a ship stands for the sound chow. But the word chow means several other things, and the determinative or "key" sign indicates these. "Thus the ship joined with the sign of water stands for chow, 'ripple'; with that of speech for chow, 'loquacity'; with that of fire for chow, 'flickering of flame,' and so on for 'waggon-pole,' 'fluff,' and several other things which have little in common but the name of chow" (Tylor, p. 102). Although, theoretically, the Chinaman has to make an enormous number of characters before he can write his own language, so that, at the age of twenty-five, a diligent student has barely acquired the same amount of facility in reading and writing which is usually attained by an English child—using the twenty-six characters of his alphabet—at the age of ten; practically some four or five thousand characters suffice for average needs, and the convenience of "a system enabling those who speak mutually unintelligible idioms, to converse together, using the pencil instead of the tongue," caused the abandonment of an attempt to make nearer approach to an alphabetic system which was promoted by the Chinese Government some centuries ago.

In contrast to this, the Japanese, with that pliability which has helped to put them in the van of Oriental peoples, selected, as a result of contact with Buddhism, which came to them by way of China, certain signs from the wilderness of Chinese characters, and constituted these as their alphabet or irofa so called, on the acrologic principle (p. 104), from the names of its first signs, like our alphabet from alpha, beta. Their language being polysyllabic, involved the result that whatever signs were used must be syllabic, and hence the adoption of a syllabary was easy. But, of course, like all syllabaries, this has the defect of necessitating the use of that larger number of signs with which the alphabet dispenses. The origin of the Japanese syllabaries, of which there are two, dates from the end of the ninth century of our Lord. One, the Hirakana, derived from a cursive form of Chinese called the tsau or "grass" character, contains about three hundred syllabic sound-signs; the other, known as the Katakana, is derived from the kyai or "model" type of the Chinese character, and is the simpler of the two in having only a single character for each of the forty-seven syllabic sounds in the Japanese language. But neither demands detailed treatment here, since with the intrusion of the Roman alphabet among Western imports into Japan its substitution for the cumbrous syllabaries is probably only a matter of brief time, and the Japanese script may then take its place with the Maya and the Aztec as a graphic curiosity.

Chinese is the official script of Corea, but the lower classes use a phonetic alphabet which, in the judgment of some authorities, is derived from a cursive form of the NÂgari script of India, having, so it is thought, been introduced by Buddhist teachers. Both past and present times afford striking examples of the influence of religion in the diffusion of alphabets, missionaries obviously making use of their own alphabet in the translation of their sacred books into the language of their converts. Whatever connection there may have been between Corean and Indian scripts is not, however, traceable, owing to the changes in the former. But in truth we know little about the matter, and there is something to be said in support of an old tradition that King Se-jo, who reigned five hundred years ago, commanded his chief grammarian, Song Sammun, to devise an alphabet that should supersede the cumbersome Chinese; whereupon that scholar took the Tibetan characters as foundation, but as those were only consonantal, he turned to the ancient Chinese and transformed six of its simplest radicals into the Corean vowels, naming the vowels and consonants "mother" and "child" respectively. The letters were "bunched together" so as to look like the Chinese characters (Fig. 38), the purpose being "to facilitate the transliteration of the Chinese text in a parallel column." There is a curious tradition, reminding us of the Chinese legend of the origin of writing, that the Corean characters were suggested by the straight and oblique lattice-work of the native doors.