In the path of the alphabet / an historical account of the ancient beginnings and evolution of the modern alphabet

by Frances Delavan Page Jermain

In speaking, the Chinese express these homophones by varying tones and gestures. In writing, their meaning is ingeniously explained by the use of two characters. One of these is a phonogram, which gives the sound of the word; the other is an ideogram or picture form, that explains which of the words having this sound is the one indicated. These ideograms are styled “keys,” and later on it will be observed are identical with the determinatives of the Assyrian and Egyptian systems. As an instance of the Chinese use of these keys, is the phonogram, ha. This has eight distinct significations. Thus, it may denote a banana tree, a war chariot, a scar, a cry, or any other of its various significations according to the key associated with this phonogram.

Thus this language, possessing but a limited number of root words, is so expanded by the varying combinations of phonetic signs and ideographic characters, that its acquisition for reading or writing is a formidable achievement.

Some of the recent dictionaries of the English language record a vocabulary of two hundred thousand words. To write any or all of these one needs only to learn the twenty-six signs of our alphabet. To write a common business letter, or to read an ordinary book in Chinese, it is necessary that the scribe or student should know familiarly from six to seven thousand of these groups of characters by which to express the forty or fifty thousand words in the vocabulary of the Chinese.

Again, many of these characters are so similar in form that to write them accurately requires intense concentration, and acute powers of memory. Notwithstanding this, China has been a center of culture and intellectual activity from her first appearance upon the stage of history.

From the earliest period, the social and political system of the Chinese has been based upon educational qualifications. All political dignities, honors and preferments, by unalterable law and usage depend upon the educated abilities and scholarship of candidates for office.

The rank of mandarin comes by no hereditary right, nor by favor of a sovereign, but through severe intellectual effort. If in some cases this is obtained through corruption and bribery of some clever scholar who sells his literary privileges to some richer competitor, this does not alter the case; honors still go to scholarship.

It is said of these successful men, the true students, that it would be difficult to parallel them in any country for readiness with the pen and retentive memory. If they are not highly educated, it is due to their false system of educational merit, which consists in an undue exercise of the memory at the expense of the thinking powers. It is also due to the fact that it is a stereotyped system, based upon an ancient usage and custom, concerned with the past and ancient tradition rather than present or future progress.

The early history of this people is specially interesting in the light of recent discoveries. These suggest, and the suggestions are confirmed in the ancient literature of the Chinese, that at a period about B. C. 2500, these people made their first appearance in China from some locality south of the Caspian Sea, in western Asia. This is supposed, from certain historical correspondences, to have been Susiana, and that their emigration was the result of political disturbances occurring throughout western Asia at that date. That, driven from their early home, they wandered eastward, finally settling in the fertile districts of Shansi and Honan, near the Yellow river. About the same time, other families of this people settled to the south in Annim, from whence these kindred people finally spread over all China.

When they first came into the country, they found there aboriginal tribes of various races. In their historical annals the most important of these primitive inhabitants are referred to as the “Kwei people.” It is said of these that they practiced the art of writing and possessed a literature which is referred to by the Chinese as the “Kwei Books,” which included a treatise on music. M. de Lacouperie conjectures these primitive people to be of the Aryan stock, of whom remnants are to be found at the present day in Cambodia.

When the Chinese came into the land they had a culture of their own. They were advanced in the industrial arts and they possessed a system of writing and a literature.