DIRECTIONS TO A SERVANT IN PIDGIN ENGLISH.
I heard a captain of a steamer address his man-servant thus, when sending him from the cabin to his stateroom on deck for a box of writing paper: “Boy, you go topside my room. You see two piecee box belong all same, (look just alike.) One piecee have pens; my no wanchee that. Other piecee have paper. My wanchee. You makee pay my, (bring that to me.) Savez? (do you understand?”) The waiter nodded assent, and brought the right box.
A lady was giving a dinner party to several gentleman and ladies. She told her butler to “set the table for sixteen piecee man.”
A sampan man whom our captain wished to hire, was asked by him how many there were to row his sampan. He replied, “Seven piecee man,” meaning, as it proved, himself, several sons, most of them young boys, and the mother who rowed with her infant tied round her neck; making seven hands, not counting the babe.
A gentleman who was joking with one of his sedan bearers, talking nonsense, was answered, “Massa C., you belong too much culio, (too funny.) My never have see one man all same culio.”
The American Eagle, that fierce gray bird with a bending beak, is known even in China by that celebrated feature. A Chinese servant told his master that while he was out a gentleman called. On being asked who it was, the servant said: “My no savee; but my can speakee what fashion he makee look see;” (what his appearance was.) “He belong one smallee man; no too muchee stout; had got one nose all same that Melican chickey.”
The mysteries of human speech are impressively illustrated in the ease with which the children of foreign extraction, brought up from infancy in China, learn and skilfully use the slight tones and the other niceties of the language. An ear accustomed to music of course is a great help in learning this language; but when a person is in the least dull of hearing, it is not easy to distinguish between some of the words, and especially the intonations, which in the Cantonese dialect, for example, so largely determine the meaning. One thought impressed me in thinking of the language as a barrier against the rest of the world: If the Chinese nature is naturally upright, and if sin is owing wholly to contamination by intercourse with depraved people, how happens it that China does not present us with a people of saints? having been kept by their language, as they have been, from mixing with men. That language has done more than their great wall in separating them from the rest of mankind.