“to get on a horse.” But it will not do to say that a preposition becomes a verb when placed before the substantive, as many other prepositions come before and not after the words they govern. If we meet such a phrase as
, literally “warn rebels,” we must not mentally label
as a verb and
as a substantive, and say to ourselves that in Chinese the verb is followed immediately by its object. Otherwise, we might be tempted to translate, “to warn the rebels,” whereas a little reflection would show us that the conjunction of “warning” and “rebels” naturally leads to the meaning “to warn (the populace or whoever it may be) against the rebels.” After all our adventurous incursions into the domain of syntax, we are soon brought back to the starting-point and are obliged to confess that each particular passage is best interpreted on its own merits, by the logic of the context and the application of common sense. There is no reason why Chinese sentences should not be dissected, by those who take pleasure in such operations, into subject, copula and predicate, but it should be early impressed upon the beginner that the profit likely to accrue to him therefrom is infinitesimal. As for fixed rules of grammatical construction, so far from being a help, he will find them a positive hindrance. It should rather be his aim to free his mind from such trammels, and to accustom himself to look upon each character as a root-idea, not a definite part of speech.
The Book Language.—Turning now to some of the more salient characteristics of the book language, with the object of explaining how it came to be so widely separated from common speech, we might reasonably suppose that in primitive times the two stood in much closer relation to each other than now. But it is certainly a striking fact that the earliest literary remains of any magnitude that have come down to us should exhibit a style very far removed from any possible colloquial idiom. The speeches of the Book of History (see Literature) are more manifestly fictitious, by many degrees, than the elaborate orations in Thucydides and Livy. If we cannot believe that Socrates actually spoke the words attributed to him in the dialogues of Plato, much less can we expect to find the ipsissima verba of Confucius in any of his recorded sayings. In the beginning, all characters doubtless represented spoken words, but it must very soon have dawned on the practical Chinese mind that there was no need to reproduce in writing the bisyllabic compounds of common speech. Chien “to see,” in its written form
