It is not pretended that Chinese scholarship will be in any way advanced by this publication. The Lectures, slight in themselves, were never meant for advanced students, but rather to draw attention to, and possibly arouse some interest in, a subject which will occupy a larger space in the future than in the present or in the past.
HERBERT A. GILES.
Cambridge, England,
April 15, 1902.
CONTENTS
[LECTURE I]
THE CHINESE LANGUAGE
Its Importance—Its Difficulty—The Colloquial—Dialects—"Mandarin"—Absence of Grammar—Illustrations—Pidgin-English—Scarcity of Vocables—The Tones—Coupled Words—The Written Language—The Indicators—Picture Characters—Pictures of Ideas—The Phonetics—Some Faulty Analyses ... [3]
[LECTURE II]
A CHINESE LIBRARY
The Cambridge (Eng.) Library—(A) The Confucian Canon—(B) Dynastic History—The "Historical Record"—The "Mirror of History"—Biography—Encyclopædias—How arranged—Collections of Reprints—The Imperial Statutes—The Penal Code—(C) Geography—Topography—An Old Volume—Account of Strange Nations—(D) Poetry—Novels—Romance of the Three Kingdoms—Plays—(E) Dictionaries—The Concordance—Its Arrangement—Imperial Catalogue—Senior Classics ... [37]