98
Some one has said that the march of improvement in China has been a dead march, and one great impediment in the way of the introduction of foreign ideas is the difficulty of acquiring the language; which in part accounts for the extreme isolation of the Chinese race from the other nations of the world. The written language has no alphabet, but is made up of forty thousand arbitrary characters, of which about five thousand are in common use. Each of these characters represent a word or syllable. While it is possible for the vocal organs to express only about five hundred distinct sounds, there are ten times that number of characters, so that the same sound may represent either one of ten different words. In English the number of words alike in sound but with different meanings are limited. In Chinese it is universal. One can readily see what an immense amount of study and how retentive a memory is required to learn this written language, which is understood by the learned class not only over the whole Chinese empire, but also in Japan, Loo-Choo, Corea, and the neighboring islands. Through it a far larger proportion of the human race can be reached than through any other language of the world.
The hundreds of thousands who are competitors for literary honors at the annual examinations perfect themselves by long and patient study in the written language, and become familiar with the writings of Confucius and the other Chinese classics. Of these but a small fraction are successful, and become the employees of the government, to whom every channel of wealth and power is open, from the Mandarin’s button to the peacock feather of the prime minister, The great mass of unsuccessful candidates settle down into village schoolmasters and teachers, and form an influential literary class of society scattered throughout the whole empire.
The spoken language of China so differs in every separate province, that people living within a hundred miles can no more understand each other’s dialect than an Englishman can understand a Spaniard. The Mandarin or court dialect is more common than any other, and is used at the capital and among officials throughout the empire.
The difficulty of acquiring a language so artificial and elaborate as the Chinese, and which only the missionaries attempt to learn, has given rise to a curious jargon
