Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 17, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 May 1895 — CHINESE IS TOO HARD. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

CHINESE IS TOO HARD.

Easier to Learn to Write than to Speak —Every Word a Picture. The Chinese language is the most difficult for an adult foreigner to acquire and easier to forget. Chinese is as different from English'as any modern language can be. It is made up of many thousands of characters, each of which is credited with only on? sound. The Chinese language has no

alphabet The sounds assigned to the characters are, as a rule, arbitrary and liable to endless corruption and variation. It is estimated that there are upward of 300 dialects in China, more than two-thirds of which are found in the Southern provinces. The Mandarin dialect, which is spoken by the Court, by the large body of officials and the majority of the people In Northern China, is no doubt the purest and nearest to that spoken by the ancient Chinese. It has the same relationship to Cliinese as Parisian does to French. The other dialects vary from this acknowledged standard in the use of words to designate various objects and in calling the same words by different sounds. The Chinese written language is very much like classical Greek and Latin in respect to stability and permanence, but unlike them it is not dead. It shows more vitality than any in the world, and seems to grow more vigorous as it grows older. It is used by one-third of the entire human race, and is understood by the Japanese, Manchus, Coreans, Lewchooans, Annamese, Tonqulnese, besides the Chinese themselves. The primitive Chinese made rude pictures of the common objects about them, and used those outlines as symbols in writing. There are Oil of these symbols, and by combining any number of them in various ways a written language of 40,000 characters has been evolved in process of time. Each Is as arbitrary as an English letter, but does not necessarily have a phonetic value. They represent definite things, actions or relations, and may just as well be 0,000 as 000 in number. The biggest word in the language is made up of fifty distinct strokes, says Yan Phou Lee, in the St., Louis Dispatch. He calls It “hash,”, because it is so mixed up and seems ttu be made up of a large number of Imn gradients.

EASY ORIENTAL WORDS.