Let us now turn to the machinery by means of which the Chinese arrest the winged words of speech, and give to mere thought and utterance a more concrete and a more lasting form.
The written language has one advantage over the colloquial: it is uniformly the same all over China; and the same document is equally intelligible to natives of Peking and Canton, just as the Arabic and Roman numerals are understood all over Europe, although pronounced differently by various nations.
To this fact some have attributed the stability of the Chinese Empire and the permanence of her political and social institutions.
If we take the written language of to-day, which is to all intents and purposes the written language of twenty-five hundred years ago, we gaze at first on what seems to be a confused mass of separate signs, each sign being apparently a fortuitous concourse of dots and dashes. Gradually, however, the eye comes to perceive that every now and again there is to be found in one character a certain portion which has already been observed in another, and this may well have given rise to the idea that each character is built up of parts equivalent to our letters of the alphabet. These portions are of two kinds, and must be considered under two separate heads.
Under the first head come a variety of words, which also occur as substantive characters, such as dog, vegetation, tree, disease, metal, words, fish, bird, man, woman. These are found to indicate the direction in which the sense of the whole character is to be sought.
Thus, whenever 犭 "dog" occurs in a character, the reader may prepare for the name of some animal, as for instance 狮 shih "lion," 猫 mao "cat," 狼 lang "wolf", 猪 ehu "pig."
Two of these are interesting words. (1) There are no lions in China; shih is merely an imitation of the Persian word shír. (2) Mao, the term for a "cat," is obviously an example of onomatopoeia.
The character 犭 will also indicate in many cases such attributes as 猾 hua "tricky," 狠 hên, "aggressive," 猛 mêng "fierce," and other characteristics of animals.
Similarly, 艹 ts'ao "vegetation" will hint at some plant; e.g. 草 ts'ao "grass," 荷 ho "the lily," 芝 chih "the plant of immortality."
木 mu "a tree" usually points toward some species of tree; e.g. 松 sung "a fir tree," 桑 sang "a mulberry tree"; and by extension it points toward anything of wood, as 板 pan "a board," 桌 cho "a table," 椅 i "a chair," and so on.