ii
with the mandarin dialect, is chiefly a dictionary of particles with copious examples of their use. Invaluable as such a work is to the student, it is not properly speaking a grammar, nor did the author adopt for it that title.
The province of the grammarian I understand to be, to find out the laws of the language, and arrange them in the most natural and convenient manner. It has been my endeavour to do some little towards realizing this conception, but practised comparative philologists must study Chinese grammar closely, before a treatise upon it free from blemishes can be composed. Ere long probably, well-qualified scholars in Europe, will pursue their researches in this field, and in the cognate languages spoken in the Birman peninsula. If so the best mode of arranging the grammar of a monosyllabic language will receive full consideration.
That scholars of high reputation still form erroneous views of the Chinese language, may be seen in the manner in which Dr. K. F. Bekker speaks of it, in his profound work on the Organism of language.[1] He says, “The oldest history of the Chinese and of other monosyllabic languages is unattainable by us. We are not in a position even to conjecture with any probability, what deviations from early development, or what outward causes, have occasioned in these languages the early and entire loss of inflections, or their original absence. But the whole organic structure of these languages, is less perfect than that of languages having inflections. Yet” he continues, “philology may obtain valuable illustrations from abnormal languages, just as physiology gains information from misshapen organisms in the animal world.”
A better acquaintance with the Chinese language will probably lead to the abandonment of such words as “abnormal” and “misshapen,” in the description of it. It will rather be spoken of, as possessing a very copious and admirable development of the principles of monosyllabic language,—as indeed the most perfect example of that class of languages. Comparative philology has hitherto directed its efforts too exclusively, to languages whose words consist of a root and some addition to or modification of the root. The Chinese must be regarded as the best type of those languages, which do not admit any modification of the root, but allow the ap-
- ↑ Organism der Sprache, von Dr. K. F. Bekker.
