to him the best, following, in most instances, the orthography of Dr. Morrison, in his Dictionary of the Mandarin tongue, where the sounds at all resembled each other;— and having once adopted it, he has found it necessary to adhere to the same throughout the work, in order to prevent mistakes and confusion.
In addition to the sounds formed by the junction of the fifteen initials and fifty finals, the inhabitants of Hok-këèn have a method of multiplying their few monosyllables, by the application of various tones, which, while the word retains the same form of spelling, produce an alteration of the intonation, by a variation of the accent. Respecting these tones of the Chinese language, some difference of opinion has obtained, and while some have considered them of the first importance, others have paid them little or no attention. The author inclines decidedly to the former opinion; having, found, from uniform experience, that without strict attention to the tones, it is impossible for a person to make himself understood in Hok-këèn. Chinese children, as soon as they begin to speak, learn the tones, as speedily as they do the sounds themselves, and the poorest people invariably observe the minutest regard to the tones; so that the author has never heard a real native of Hok-këèn make the slightest mistake in the tones, even in the hurried conversation of common life. Indeed a Chinese is more likely to make a mistake in the orthography than in the accent of a word, and when charged with pronouncing tëem instead of lëem, will defend himself, by saying that, at any rate the words are in the same tone, and therefore there cannot be much difference between them. A horse in Hok-këèn is báy, in the upper tone, with an acute accent, but the Chinese, in speaking of a horse, would as soon think of changing the orthography into báng, as of altering the accent into bây, which is in the lower even tone, with a circumflex over it. In the native Dictionary which is made the basis of the present work, the tones are most particularly defined, and the arrangement of each section is more according to the tone than the orthography; for instance, the first section contains all the words of the even tone, under a certain final, as connected with the different initials, and not a single upper tone is brought forward, till all the even tones of that final are given; the second section then contains all the words under the upper tone of the same final, and so on; so that run in the even tone will be found under one section, and kwún, in the upper tone under another. This arrangement, in which the accent is regarded more than the spelling, is peculiar to the Chinese, and shews what great stress they lay on a difference of tone, even more so than on a difference of orthography. In the following pages, this arrangement has been reversed, and the words are classed according to their alphabetical order, yet the author has endeavoured to mark, in every instance, the peculiar tone to be affixed to each word, and that not only in the words placed
