Travels in China by Sir John Barrow (best ereader manga txt) 📖
- Author: Sir John Barrow
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Come you with him,
Ne-lai tung ta.
The adjective is also formed from the genitive of the noun as pai, whiteness; pai-tié white; je heat; je-tié hot; lee, reason; lee-tié, rational; hau goodness; hau tié, good. But when the adjective precedes the noun, as it generally does, the particle tié is omitted as,
pai-ma, a white horse.
je-swee, hot water.
The plural of nouns is expressed by prefixing some word signifying plurality, as to-jin, many men; to-to jin, a multitude of men; chung jin, all men; and sometimes by a repetition of the word as jin-jin, men.
Adjectives are compared by placing the particle keng before the comparative, as
hau, good; keng hau, better.
My book is newer than yours,
Go-te shoo keng sin ne-te.
The superlative is marked by various particles, sometimes preceding, and sometimes following, the adjective, and it is also formed by repeating the positive, as
whang-whang-tié, very yellow.
The personal pronouns are,
I, thou, he, we, ye, they.
And they become possessives, in the same manner as nouns are changed into adjectives, by the addition of te or tié, as
mine, thine, his, ours, yours, theirs.
The verb has likewise neither conjugation nor inflection; and the tenses, or times of action or passion, are limited to three; the present, the past, and the future. The present is signified simply by the verb, as go lai, I come; the past, is expressed by the particle leo, as go lai leo, I did come, or I have come; and the future is formed by placing the particle yau before the verb, as go yau lai, I will come; or, when something very determined is meant to be expressed, the compound yuen-y precedes the verb, as go yuen-y-lai, I am determined to come. It may be observed, however, that although these, and other particles signifying the time and mode of action, are necessary in common speech, yet, in fine writing, they are entirely omitted, which is another cause of the obscurity and difficulty that occur to strangers in the study of the Chinese character.
The two negatives mo and poo, are of great use in the spoken language. The first is generally used with the verb yeu to have, and always implies a want or deficiency, as, mo yeu nai, there is no milk; mo yeu tcha, you can have no tea, I have no tea, there is no tea, &c. Poo is generally used to express qualities of an opposite nature, as, hau, good, poo hau, bad; je, hot; poo je, cold; ta, great; poo ta, little. The usual salutation between friends is hau-poo-hau, well, or not well?
The limits I have prescribed for the present work will not allow me to enter into a more detailed account of this singular language. What has been said may serve to convey a general idea of the written character, and the simple construction of the spoken language. I shall now endeavour, in a few words, to explain the nature and construction of the Mantchoo Tartar character, which, if the present family continue on the throne for a century longer, will, in all probability, supplant the Chinese, or will at least become the court language. In the enunciation it is full, sonorous, and far from being disagreeable, more like the Greek than any of the oriental languages; and it abounds with all those letters which the Chinese have rejected, particularly with the letters B and R. It is alphabetic, or, more properly speaking, syllabic, and the different parts of speech are susceptible of expressing number, case, gender, time, modes of action, passion, and other accidents, similar to those of European languages. This is effected either by change of termination, preposition, or interposition. The character is extremely beautiful, and it is written, like the Chinese, in perpendicular columns, but beginning on the left side of the paper instead of the right, as is the case in writing the former language.
The elements of the language are comprized in twelve classes of simple sounds or monosyllables, from the different combinations of which all the words of the Mantchoo language are formed.
These classes are distinguished by the terminations.
The first class ends in a, e, i, o, u, pronounced exactly as the Italian.
The second, in ai, ei, iei, oi, ui.
The third, in ar, er, ir, or, ur, air, &c.
The fourth, in an, en, in, &c.
The fifth, in ang, eng, ing, &c.
The sixth, in ak, ek, ik, &c.
The seventh, in as, es, is, &c.
The eighth, in at, et, it, &c.
The ninth, in ap, ep, ip, &c.
The tenth, in au, eu, iu, ou.
The eleventh, in al, el, il, &c.
The twelfth, in am, em, im, &c.
The initials are, A. E. F. H. I. K. L. M. N. O. P. R. S. T. U. Y.
To give some idea of the character, I subjoin the written elements.
The initial characters are represented by respective marks, which being joined to these elementary terminations, generally at the upper extremity, give all the monosyllabic sounds, and the junction of these according to their various combinations all the words in the Mantchoo language. One example will be sufficient to shew the nature of such composition; thus the initials P. T. L. S. F. set before the 12th class of radicals, will stand as follows:
And if each of these syllables be respectively added to the 5th class, they will stand thus:
Of the state of their literature, and progress in science, I have little to observe. The nature of the language will almost itself determine these points. With respect to any branch of polite literature, or speculative science, little improvement seems to have been made in the last two thousand years. Indeed, there are no works in the whole empire, modern or ancient, that are so much esteemed, so much studied, and I may perhaps add, so little comprehended, as the five classical books collected and commented upon by their great philosopher Cong-foo-tse, who lived about 450 years before the Christian æra; and these certainly are very extraordinary productions for the time in which they were written. These works and a few writings of their favourite master, according to the annals of the country, escaped the general destruction of books, when the barbarous She-whang-te ordered all the monuments of learning to be burnt, except such as treated of medicine and agriculture, about 200 years before Christ, for the absurd purpose, as they state, that he might be considered by posterity as the first civilized Emperor which had governed China, and that the records of its history might, by this mean artifice, appear to commence with his reign.
Admitting such an event to have happened which, however, may be considered as doubtful, the supposition involves in it this necessary consequence, that the stock of learning at that time must have been very confined. It is scarcely possible, otherwise, how one person, near the end of his reign, could have contrived to assemble together all the works of art and literature, dispersed through so large a tract of country and so enlightened as it was then supposed to be. There were, besides, other independent sovereigns in the country, over whom he had little or no controul, so that it is very probable the commonwealth of letters suffered no great loss by the burning of the Chinese books. When the Caliph Omar commanded the Alexandrian library to be destroyed, which the pride and the learning of the Ptolemy family had collected from every part of the world, literature sustained an irreparable loss; but, although the tyrant had the power to consign to eternal oblivion the works of science, yet he had no power over the principles upon which these works were constructed. These principles had spread themselves wide over the world. The expedition of Alexander carried the learning of the Egyptians and the Greeks into various countries of Asia, where they continued to flourish. And when the tyranny and oppression of the seventh Ptolemy (Physcon) forced the Alexandrians to abandon a city that was perpetually streaming with the blood of its citizens, they found an asylum in the Grecian states and in different parts of Asia. And as this sanguinary tyrant, in the midst of his cruelties, pretended and indeed shewed a fondness for literature, the arts and the sciences flourished even in his reign: the migrations, therefore, at this time, from the capital of Egypt, were of the greatest importance and use to those nations among whom the refugees settled. Unluckily for China, the wild mountainous forests towards the south, and the wide sandy deserts to the north, that render any communication extremely difficult between this empire and the rest of Asia, together with their dislike for foreigners, seem, at this time, to have checked the progress of those arts and sciences which had long flourished in Europe and in Africa. Their history, at least, is silent as to any communication with India, till a century nearly after the commencement of the Christian æra, when the religion of Budha found its way from Thibet into China.
Whether the burning of the works of the learned in China did or did not happen, appears, as already observed, to admit of some doubt; but the antiquity, and the authenticity, of the five king, or classics, seem to be sufficiently established. And considering the early periods in which they were written, they certainly demonstrate a very superior degree of civilization. It has been observed that, in this country, the arts, the sciences, and literature, are not progressive; and the five king would lead one to conclude, that they have rather even been retrograde than stationary. The names of these works are:
1. Shoo-king. A collection of records and annals of various princes, commencing more than 2000 years before Christ.
2. Shee-king. Odes, sonnets, and maxims; most of them so abundant in metaphor, and so obscure, that much of the sense is to be made out by the translator.
3. Ye-king. The perfect and the broken lines of Fo-shee; the most ancient relict in China, and perhaps the first attempt at written language: now perfectly incomprehensible.
4. Chung-choo. Spring and autumn. The history of some of the kings of Loo: the work principally of Cong-foo-tse.
5. Lee-kee. Ceremonies and moral duties. A compilation of Cong-foo-tse.
The lines of Fo-shee puzzled even the great philosopher of the country, who declared himself dissatisfied with all the explanations of the commentators. The learned and ingenious Leibnitz fancied he discovered in them a system of binary arithmetic, by which all the operations and results of numbers might be performed, with the help of two figures only, the cypher or zero 0, and an unit 1, the former being considered as the constant multiple of the latter, as 10 is of the unit. Thus 1 would stand for 1, 10 for two, 11 for three, 100 for four, and so on. It is unnecessary to observe, with how many inconveniences such a system would be attended when reduced to practice. This discovery of the binary series, which the mathematician, in all probability, considered only as a philosophical plaything, was communicated
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