VIII
THE LANGUAGES OF CHINA AND JAPAN
People often ask me if there is any affinity between the Chinese language and ours. I can at once say there is no affinity whatever, but this requires much explanation before I can clearly show it.
The written language of China, viz. ideographs, is the same all over the extensive sphere of China proper, but its pronunciation is different almost in every province. The spoken language of the Chinese is, roughly speaking, the same as the written language, as is the case in the Western nations. Therefore, the Chinese residing in different provinces do not understand each other colloquially, except those educated in the Mandarine Chinese, which is in fact the pronunciation used in Peking amongst the Mandarins and studied by all Mandarins in provinces as well as those in Peking.
The first difference between Chinese and Japanese is that the former is monosyllabic, whilst the latter is polysyllabic. The second difference, which is a natural consequence of the first, is that in Chinese there is no declension of nouns or conjugation of verbs, whilst in Japanese there are conjugations of verbs and a method of the formation of the cases of nouns which is in purport similar to declensions. The third difference is the position or order of words in sentences. The fourth difference is the difference of pronunciation of the Chinese ideographs, viz. characters, even when they are used in our writing in their original shapes.
I will now explain in detail all these points in the succeeding pages.
To begin with, Chinese is monosyllabic, as I said. Each word, which always has one signification, be it a noun or a verb, has only one sound. Thus a harbour in Chinese is kong, whilst it is minato in Japanese; and a man in Chinese is jen, whilst it is hito in Japanese. It is the same with verbs. The sound of each word of Chinese never changes, whatever position it may stand in relation to other words in the same sentence, that is to say, there is no declension and no conjugation. Each word is represented by a distinct ideograph, and, from what I have just said, it follows that the form of the ideographs also never changes, in the same way as the sounds do not change.
In Chinese different shades of meaning as to the actions and agents are expressed by the position of the words, by addition of some other words. In simple sentences, therefore, it resembles English very much; thus, for instance, when a Chinese says: 'John likes Paul,' it is plain, like English, that he who likes Paul is John, and he who is liked is Paul. When a Chinese wishes to express the same idea in the passive voice, he would say, 'Paul by John is liked,' which is the same as 'Paul is liked by John,' Neither has Chinese any preposition like English or French, nor any post-position like Japanese, to designate the cases, except a few which resemble prepositions meaning 'from,' 'to,' and 'by,' but even these are very sparingly employed and by no means with any regularity. When a verb is used as a substantive the form is still identical; thus one identical ideograph, 'like,' may represent a verb 'to like' or a substantive 'liking.' Of course there are many terms designating one thing or one action consisting of more than one sound; such are, however, combinations of two or three distinct words, like the English word 'firearms' or 'seesaw,' and therefore none of them could properly be called one distinct polysyllabic word.
In Japanese, unlike Greek, Latin, or German, there is no proper declension in nouns. In this respect it is more like English or French, but it has a method of forming the cases, so that in this respect it differs from Chinese. Our cases are formed by putting after them the so-called ga—no—ni—wo—thus: