for food. In boring its hole, the piddock fixes itself firmly by its foot, and works itself from side to side, making use thus of the rasping power of its shell. See Colored Plate of Clams and Edible Mussels.
PIDGIN (Chinese corruption of Eng.
business), or Pigeon English. A mixed language
much in use in the ports of China, as a medium
of oral communication between foreigners who
cannot speak Chinese (merchants, sea-captains,
sailors, etc.) and such Chinese servants,
shopkeepers, compradores, boatmen, etc., as they may
have to converse with. It is also occasionally
used by natives from different ports whose own
dialects are so different as to be mutually
unintelligible. It consists of a mixture of English
words, mostly monosyllabic, with corrupted
Chinese, Portuguese, Malay, and other terms and
expressions, arranged according to Chinese idiom.
These words are “uninflected” except to the
extent that vowel-endings such as o or ee are
frequently added after certain consonants which the
Chinese in common with the Japanese are
unable to pronounce without a following vowel; for
example: washee for wash; largee for large;
s'posee for suppose; wifo for wife. Owing to the
inability of the Chinese to pronounce initial r,
l takes its place, and ‘rice’ becomes lice;
‘American’ becomes Melican; ‘friend’ becomes
flen’, and ‘try’ becomes tli. Among the
corrupted Chinese words are bobbery, noise,
disturbance, abuse, scold, either noun or verb, as
“you makee too muchee bobbery”; “how fashion
you bobbery my?” Chop is a mark, brand, or
device; chop-chop means ‘quick! make haste!’ and
the same chop occurs in chop-sticks or ‘hasteners’
used in eating. Chow-chow means food or
eat; and maskee (probably of Malay or Portuguese
origin), ‘never mind! no matter!’ Belong
takes the place of ‘be’; my is equivalent to I, me,
my, mine (“no belong my” = I didn't do it, or
it is not mine). Savey means ‘know’; ‘not’ is
replaced by no, and the opening sentence of
Hamlet's famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be! That
is the question,” is simply rendered by “Can do,
no can do! How fashion?” Joss-pidgin means
religious ceremony, and Joss-pidgin man, a priest,
clergyman, or missionary. In the same way a
tourist or sightseer becomes a look-see man,
and ‘get’ is expressed by catchee. Consult Leutzner,
Wörterbuch der englischen Volkssprache
Australiens und der englischen Mischsprachen (Halle,
1891).
PIDGIN, Charles Felton (1844—). An American writer, statistician, and inventor, born in Roxbury, Mass. He received an academic education, was in the mercantile business in Boston from 1863 to 1873, and in June of the latter year became chief clerk of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor. Among many other machines and appliances for the mechanical tabulation of statistics, he invented an electrical adding and multiplying machine, an addition register, a self-counting tally sheet, and automatic multiple tabulating machine. He wrote the librettos for a number of musical comedies, and cantatas, and the words for more than sixty songs, and, in addition to many magazine articles, published: Practical Statistics; or the Statistician at Work (1888); and the novels, Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks (1900), and Blennerhasset, or the Decrees of Fate (1901).
PIEDMONT, pēd′mōnt (It. Piemonte, country at the foot of the mountains). A compartimento of the Italian kingdom embracing the provinces of Turin, Cuneo, Alessandria, and Novara, and bounded by Switzerland, France, Liguria, and Lombardy. In 1247 a partition of the territories of Savoy (q.v.) led to the establishment of the two related lines of Savoy and Piedmont. The rulers of the second line were made princes of the Empire in the early part of the fourteenth century. In 1418 the dynasty became extinct and the land reverted to Savoy. From 1797 to 1814 it was a part of France. It constituted the principal part of the former Kingdom of Sardinia (q.v.), which was not infrequently spoken of as the Kingdom of Piedmont. See Italy.
PIEDMONT PLAIN. A name used in the physiography of the United States to designate that part of the Atlantic coast-plain which lies between the Appalachian highland and the low coastal plain proper. It is distinguished from the latter topographically by being more rugged and eroded with deeper river-valleys, and geologically by consisting of much older and harder rock strata. The change from the hard to the soft and recent formation is marked by a definite line of escarpments over which nearly all the Atlantic rivers fall in rapids or cataracts, and the line is known as the ‘fall line.’ The Piedmont Plain is less defined in New England than in the Southern States. It is narrowest and also approaches closest to the sea in New York, and broadens southward, being about 300 miles wide in North Carolina.
PIED PIPER OF HAMELIN, The. A poem by Robert Browning (1842), written for a child of Macready, the actor, on the old legend of the piper who agreed to rid the town of rats in 1284, and, because he was not paid, lured the children of Hamelin by his playing to a cave in the mountain, where they disappeared.
PIE′GAN. One of the most interesting of the Algonquian tribes in North America. They are associated with the Siksika and the Kino or Bloods in the so-called Siksika confederacy, and over two thousand of them are on the Blackfeet agency in northwestern Montana. They are well disposed and tractable, and crimes are almost unknown among them. The other members of the confederacy extend northward into Canada, where they join their co-linguists, the Creeks (q.v.), to form the westernmost tribes of the most widely diffused language family in the Western Hemisphere.
PIEHL, pēl, Karl (1853—). A Swedish Egyptologist, born at Stockholm. He was docent in Egyptian languages at Upsala in 1881, became director of the Egyptian Museum in 1889, and in 1893 was appointed to a newly endowed chair of Egyptology. Three years afterwards Piehl became editor of the Sphinx, a periodical of Egyptian archæology. His publications include: Petites études égyptologiques (1881); Dictionnaire du papyrus Harris No. 1 (1882); and the great work, Inscriptions hiéroglyphiques (1884 sqq.).
PIENZA, pē̇-ĕn′tsȧ. A town in the Province of Siena. Italy, 2.5 miles southeast of Siena. It is interesting because of the extant examples of early Renaissance architecture. The chief of
