China and the Chinese Part 1

China and the Chinese.

by Herbert Allen Giles.

PREFACE

The following Lectures were delivered during March, 1902, at Columbia University, in the city of New York, to inaugurate the foundation by General Horace W. Carpentier of the Dean Lung Chair of Chinese.

By the express desire of the authorities of Columbia University these Lectures are now printed, and they may serve to record an important and interesting departure in Oriental studies.

It is not pretended that Chinese scholars.h.i.+p will be in any way advanced by this publication. The Lectures, slight in themselves, were never meant for advanced students, but rather to draw attention to, and possibly arouse some interest in, a subject which will occupy a larger s.p.a.ce in the future than in the present or in the past.

HERBERT A. GILES.

Cambridge, England, April 15, 1902.

LECTURE I

THE CHINESE LANGUAGE

If the Chinese people were to file one by one past a given point, the interesting procession would never come to an end. Before the last man of those living to-day had gone by, another and a new generation would have grown up, and so on for ever and ever.

The importance, as a factor in the sum of human affairs, of this vast nation,-of its language, of its literature, of its religions, of its history, of its manners and customs,-goes therefore without saying. Yet a serious attention to China and her affairs is of very recent growth.

Twenty-five years ago there was but one professor of Chinese in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; and even that one spent his time more in adorning his profession than in imparting his knowledge to cla.s.ses of eager students. Now there are all together five chairs of Chinese, the occupants of which are all more or less actively employed.

But we are still sadly lacking in what Columbia University appears to have obtained by the stroke of a generous pen,-adequate funds for endowment. Meanwhile, I venture to offer my respectful congratulations to Columbia University on having surmounted this initial difficulty, and also to prophesy that the foresight of the liberal donor will be amply justified before many years are over.

I have often been asked if Chinese is, or is not, a difficult language to learn. To this question it is quite impossible to give a categorical answer, for the simple reason that Chinese consists of at least two languages, one colloquial and the other written, which for all practical purposes are about as distinct as they well could be.

Colloquial Chinese is a comparatively easy matter. It is, in fact, more easily acquired in the early stages than colloquial French or German. A student will begin to speak from the very first, for the simple reason that there is no other way. There are no Declensions or Conjugations to be learned, and consequently no Paradigms or Irregular Verbs.

In a day or two the student should be able to say a few simple things.

After three months he should be able to deal with his ordinary requirements; and after six months he should be able to chatter away more or less accurately on a variety of interesting subjects. A great deal depends upon the method by which he is taught.

The written or book language, on the other hand, may fairly be regarded as a sufficient study for a lifetime; not because of the peculiar script, which yields when systematically attacked, but because the style of the book language is often so extremely terse as to make it obscure, and sometimes so lavishly ornate that without wide reading it is not easy to follow the figurative phraseology, and historical and mythological allusions, which confront one on every page.

There are plenty of men, and some women, nowadays, who can carry on a conversation in Chinese with the utmost facility, and even with grace.

Some speak so well as to be practically indistinguishable from Chinamen.

There are comparatively few men, and I venture to say still fewer, if any, women, who can read an ordinary Chinese book with ease, or write an ordinary Chinese letter at all.

Speaking of women as students of Chinese, there have been so far only two who have really placed themselves in the front rank. It gives me great pleasure to add that both these ladies, lady missionaries, were natives of America, and that it was my privilege while in China to know them both. In my early studies of Chinese I received much advice and a.s.sistance from one of them, the late Miss Lydia Fay. Later on, I came to entertain a high respect for the scholars.h.i.+p and literary attainments of Miss Adele M. Fielde, a well-known auth.o.r.ess.

Before starting upon a course of colloquial Chinese, it is necessary for the student to consider in what part of China he proposes to put his knowledge into practice. If he intends to settle or do business in Peking, it is absolute waste of time for him to learn the dialect of Shanghai. Theoretically, there is but one language spoken by the Chinese people in China proper,-over an area of some two million square miles, say twenty-five times the area of England and Scotland together.

Practically, there are about eight well-marked dialects, all clearly of a common stock, but so distinct as to const.i.tute eight different languages, any two of which are quite as unlike as English and Dutch.

These dialects may be said to fringe the coast line of the Empire of China. Starting from Canton and coasting northward, before we have left behind us the province in which Canton is situated, Kuangtung, we reach Swatow, where a totally new dialect is spoken. A short run now brings us to Amoy, the dialect of which, though somewhat resembling that of Swatow, is still very different in many respects. Our next stage is Foochow, which is in the same province as Amoy, but possesses a special dialect of its own. Then on to Wenchow, with another dialect, and so on to Ningpo with yet another, widely spoken also in Shanghai, though the latter place really has a _patois_ of its own.

Farther north to Chefoo, and thence to Peking, we come at last into the range of the great dialect, popularly known as Mandarin, which sweeps round behind the narrow strip of coast occupied by the various dialects above mentioned, and dominates a hinterland const.i.tuting about four-fifths of China proper. It is obvious, then, that for a person who settles in a coast district, the dialect of that district must be his chief care, while for the traveller and explorer Mandarin will probably stand him in best stead.

The dialect of Peking is now regarded as standard "Mandarin"; but previous to the year 1425 the capital was at Nanking, and the dialect of Nanking was the Mandarin then in vogue. Consequently, Pekingese is the language which all Chinese officials are now bound to speak.

Those who come from certain parts of the vast hinterland speak Mandarin almost as a mother tongue, while those from the seaboard and certain adjacent parts of the interior have nearly as much difficulty in acquiring it, and quite as much difficulty in speaking it with a correct accent, as the average foreigner.

The importance of Mandarin, the "official language" as the Chinese call it, is beyond question. It is the vehicle of oral communication between all Chinese officials, even in cases where they come from the same part of the country and speak the same _patois_, between officials and their servants, between judge and prisoner. Thus, in every court of justice throughout the Empire the proceedings are carried on in Mandarin, although none of the parties to the case may understand a single word.

The prosecutor, on his knees, tells his story in his native dialect.

This story is rendered into Mandarin by an official interpreter for the benefit of the magistrate; the magistrate asks his questions or makes his remarks in Mandarin, and these are translated into the local dialect for the benefit of the litigants. Even if the magistrate knows the dialect himself,-as is often the case, although no magistrate may hold office in his own province,-still it is not strictly permissible for him to make use of the local dialect for magisterial purposes.

It may be added that in all large centres, such as Canton, Foochow, and Amoy, there will be found, among the well-to-do tradesmen and merchants, many who can make themselves intelligible in something which approximates to the dialect of Peking, not to mention that two out of the above three cities are garrisoned by Manchu troops, who of course speak that dialect as their native tongue.

Such is Mandarin. It may be compared to a limited extent with Urdu, the camp language of India. It is obviously the form of colloquial which should be studied by all, except those who have special interests in special districts, in which case, of course, the _patois_ of the locality comes to the front.

We will now suppose that the student has made up his mind to learn Mandarin. The most natural thing for him, then, to do will be to look around him for a grammar. He may have trouble in finding one. Such works do actually exist, and they have been, for the most part, to quote a familiar trade-mark, "made in Germany." They are certainly not made by the Chinese, who do not possess, and never have possessed, in their language, an equivalent term for grammar. The language is quite beyond reach of the application of such rules as have been successfully deduced from Latin and Greek.

The Chinese seem always to have spoken in monosyllables, and these monosyllables seem always to have been incapable of inflection, agglutination, or change of any kind. They are in reality root-ideas, and are capable of adapting themselves to their surroundings, and of playing each one such varied parts as noun, verb (transitive, neuter, or even causal), adverb, and conjunction.

The word ? _wo_, which for convenience' sake I call "I," must be rendered into English by "me" whenever it is the object of some other word, which, also for convenience' sake, I call a verb. It has further such extended senses as "egoistic" and "subjective."

For example: ??? _wo ai t'a_.

The first of these characters, which is really the root-idea of "self,"

stands here for the p.r.o.noun of the first person; the last, which is really the root-idea of "not self," "other," stands for the p.r.o.noun of the third person; and the middle character for the root-idea of "love."

This might mean in English, "I love him," or "I love her," or "I love it,"-for there is no gender in Chinese, any more than there is any other indication of grammatical susceptibilities. We can only decide if "him,"

"her," or "it" is intended by the context, or by the circ.u.mstances of the case.

Now if we were to transpose what I must still call the p.r.o.nouns, although they are not p.r.o.nouns except when we make them so, we should have-

??? _t'a ai wo_

"he, she, _or_ it loves me," the only change which the Chinese words have undergone being one of position; while in English, in addition to the inflection of the p.r.o.nouns, the "love" of the first person becomes "loves" in the third person.

Again, supposing we wished to write down-

"People love him (or her),"

we should have-

??? _jen ai t'a_,

in which once more the noticeable feature is that the middle character, although pa.s.sing from the singular to the plural number, suffers no change of any kind whatever.

Further, the character for "man" is in the plural simply because such a rendering is the only one which the genius of the Chinese language will here tolerate, helped out by the fact that the word by itself does not mean "_a_ man," but rather what we may call the root-idea of humanity.