CHINESE LANGUAGE, WRITING, AND LITERATURE. The Chinese language belongs to those Asiatic languages commonly called monosyllabic, because each word is uttered by a single movement of the organs of speech, and expresses in itself a complete idea or thing. All Chinese words end either in a vowel, a diphthong (in which, however, each vowel sound is distinctly pronounced, making the word often to appear of more than one syllable), or a nasal. Of such simple words or roots there are about 450. But the emphasis or accent of many of these words may be varied by the speaker in four or five different ways, so as to produce a corresponding variety in their meaning, by which means the number of simple words or roots amounts to about 1200. There is no of parts of speech in the Chinese language, and no recognition of the principle of inflection, Chinese words being incapable of any modification of form. The relations of words are ascertained by their position in a sentence. Hence Chinese grammar is solely syntax. Thus ta, accord ing to its position in a sentence, at one time serves the purpose of an adjective, meaning "great;" at another, a substantive, meaning " greatness;" and again of a verb, meaning "to enlarge" and "to be great," or of the adverb "very." There are certain words, however, which have at length lapsed into so vague and general a signification, that in conversation and literature they are now used in some cases as particles to determine the relations of other words; but in the older literature this is very rare, and is against the genius of the language. From what has been said, it will readily be inferred that the gender, number, and case of words are not determined by the form of the words themselves. They are, in fact, denoted by the addition of other words. Thus, people in Chinese is multitude man, son is man child, daughter is woman child. The best of men is in Chinese a hundred man good. The purest Chinese is spoken at Nankin, but the same idiom, called "the language of the mandarins," is spoken by the educated in all parts of the empire. For a knowledge of Chinese grammar, see Schott's Chinesi.?che Spraeldehre (Berlin, 1857); Summers's Handbook of the Chinese Language (1863); Julien, Synta.re Nouvelle de in Longue Ghinoise (Paris, 1870); Morrison's Dictionary (f the Chinese Language (Shanghai, 1865).
In Chinese the written character, generally speaking, does not indicate the sound of the word, but gives a kind of hieroglyph;e or pictorial representation of the idea or thing to be expressed. Ilence there are requirea as many of these characters or symbols as there are ideas to be represented. Since many words similar in sound are different in signification, whilst in writing each 'don has its peculiar symbol. the number of
words represented by writing—without reckoning those peculiar to certain dialects—is perhaps ten times greater than those distinguished by the ear. The number, in fact, is reckoned at 50,000, but the3e are tar from being all in general use. In writing and printing, the characters are arranged in perpendicular columns, which follow one another from right to left.
In its origin, Chinese writing is hieroglyphic or picture-writing, with the addition of a limited number of symbolical and conventional signs; the larger number of Chinese characters are formed by the combination of such hieroglyphs and signs. But as one such character by itself seldom determines the sound, an additional word is con joined for this purpose; so that the great mass of Chinese written words consist of an ideographic and a phonetic element. Native grammarians divide their characters into six classes. The first class comprises simple pictorial representations of sensible objects, such as sun, moon, mouutaiu, etc., and contains 608 characters. The second class includes such characters as are formed by the combination of two or more simple hiero glyphs, which together convey, in a more or less intelligible manner, some other idea: for example, the hieroglyph for sun, combined with that for moon, conveys the idea of light; mouth and bird, that of song, etc. ; of these there are 740. The third class embraces those characters which indicate certain relations of position, as above, below, the numerals, etc.; of these there are 107. The fourth class consists of characters which, by being inverted, acquire an opposite signification, as right, left, standing, lying, etc., and contains 372. The characters of the fifth class are termed derived characters; the meaning of the simple or compound characters used to express physical objects, is transferred to mental objects, or to other physical objects with which they are asso ciated, e. g., the hieroglyph for a heart signifies the soul—that for a room, signifies the wife, etc. ; of these there are 598. The characters of the sixth class include those which are composed, as above mentioned, of sign and sound. Almost all names of plants, fishes, birds, and many other objects which it would be difficult to represent hieroglyphically, are denoted by the compound characters of the sixth class, which amount to 21,810 in num ber. As this class, however, consists merely of repetitions of the other five classes, the immense number of Chinese characters maybe reduced to 2,425; and whoever learns these may be said to know them all.