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cross of the Redeemer. China has her great wall, and her stronger barrier of prejudice, cold-hearted philosophy and idolatrous superstition; but what are these against the power of the Eternal? Can

China forbid the sun to shine, and the winds to blow? Neither can she resist the word and will of the Holy One. The missionary will go forth as a conqueror, and the Word of God will universally prevail; for it is said of the Redeemer, "I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession."— Ps. ii. 8.

CHAPTER XVIII.

LANGUAGE.

The Origin of all Languages is the same.-The original Words, or Roots, of all Languages are generally, if not universally, Monosyllables.-The original Characters of written Language are Hieroglyphical.-Tradescant Lay's Analysis.— Probable Number of Derivatives in the Chinese Language. -Chinese Figures and Words.-No single Chinese Name for Deity in the Sense in which Europeans receive it.

of

It is not your intention, I dare say, to learn the Chinese language; and if it be, there is no desire on my part to become your instructor. If any you happen to think that languages may be picked up as easily as mushrooms, an attempt to learn Chinese will convince you of your mistake.

Think not, however, because I happen to know that the Chinese language is difficult to learn, that I would discourage you, if duty required you to attain it. Far from it; for I should be ashamed of you, if you turned your back upon any enterprise that duty called upon you to achieve. Steadiness, firmness, resolution, and perseverance will work wonders. For myself, if I had engaged to

ORIGIN OF ALL LANGUAGES THE SAME. 169

commit to memory all the writings of Confucius, be assured that I would not lightly abandon the undertaking.

The Chinese animate themselves, whilst pursuing their studies, by repeating such sentences as these : "Men have dug through mountains to cut a channel for the sea, and have melted the very stones to repair the southern skies. Under the whole heaven there is nothing difficult. It is only that men's minds are not determined."

The origin of all languages is, undoubtedly, the same; signification and sound must have preceded written characters. It is said, in Holy Scriptures, that "out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air, and brought them unto Adam, to see what he would call them, and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field." Gen. ii. 19, 20.

First, then, came nouns, or the names of living creatures and inanimate objects; then, naturally enough, would follow adjectives to express the different qualities of the nouns, with verbs and other parts of speech in succession.

It is said that the original words or roots in all languages are monosyllables. I will not undertake to affirm or deny this; for though undoubtedly an examination of most, if not of all, languages

170 WRITTEN LANGUAGE AT FIRST HIEROGLYPHICAL.

will go far to establish this rule as general, I question if it will prove it to be universal. Were we called upon, now, to give names to things which were altogether new to us, we should most likely describe them as they affected us; those which excited most surprise or admiration, would be rendered more emphatic than the others, either by a more striking sound, or by the addition of another syllable, as the case might be; and I see no reason, if it would be thus now, why it should not have been so originally. That there is a law within us, as some intelligent scholars suppose, which has by a sort of necessity led mankind universally to adopt monosyllables as the origin of languages, is difficult to conceive. Hardly, however, will it be worth our while to undertake the clearing up of this point, seeing that if monosyllables have not universally, they have at least generally, been the origin of language.

The origin of written language is allowed by all to be hieroglyphical: the thing signified was set forth by a character somewhat resembling it; but in process of time was discovered the great advantage of using characters to convey meaning by sounds rather than by resemblances. It is much easier to collect in an alphabet all the sounds of a language, and then to use that alphabet in the formation of words, than it is to draw the varied resemblances of the things we wish to describe.

The Chinese written language was once much

FORTY THOUSAND DERIVATIVES.

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more pictorial than it now is. At the present time it seems to be a something between the hieroglyphical and the alphabetical. There are a number of particular forms which constitute the simple elements or radicals, or what the Chinese call the eyes of the language. Tradescant Lay, who has paid more than ordinary attention to the Chinese, says, that in his Analysis about fifteen hundred words with their appropriate characters are treated as integrals, and are ranged among the radicals before mentioned, as forming with them the proper roots of the language. They correspond to the roots of the Hebrew and other Oriental languages, and to the primitive words in our own. In his Analysis he has ranged the derivatives under the primitives, as words are ranged in an English dictionary. He says, "An essay to prove that the Chinese is identical in its structure with all other languages may appear Quixotic at the first hearing, but ere a quarter of a century has rolled away, it will be a matter of surprise that any man should have thought otherwise."

The difficulty of attaining Chinese is much increased by the circumstance of the same characters having different sounds and meanings. Thus, a word may be pronounced in four or five different ways, bearing as many significations.

Independent of the primitive words of the language, there are, at the very least, forty thousand derivatives, formed by putting two or three of the