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discovered primitives: but even in this system, if system it may be called, there is more of fancy than of philosophical arrangement; and we strongly suspect the case to be the same with regard to Dr. Marshman's discovery of primitives; but he shall have the benefit of illustrating his theory by one of his own examples, taken at random from a great number produced in support of it.

choong, the midst, right, within, thorough,

The character

formed by drawing a perpendicular stroke through

mouth, gives birth to nineteen derivatives; uniting

with

khou, the

yin, a man, it formschoong, the second or mid

dle brother of three.

choong, deep; also a little child.

choong, the ancient character for a writer of annals.

ping, an icicle,

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No♪ sin, the heart, choong, grief.

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IP, choong, faithful, upright.

choong, agitated as waters;

choong, a small vessel or cup.

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种 choong, rising corn,

choong, to bring forth with much difficulty. To

pierce through.

choong, a species of the bamboo.

choong, a bird's direct ascent through the air.

choong, a species of grass.

with choong, insects, it formschoong, the food of insects,

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It is possible that the union of two characters in Chinese may sometimes suggest more than one idea. Thus choong may suggest the idea of the midst, or the point of rectitude, and also that of something within. Nor is it improbable that one person, in uniting the primitive to the formative, might realize one idea suggested by it, while another might fix his attention upon one somewhat different. Some of the derivatives springing from this primitive seem formed by uniting the idea of the midst to that expressed by the formative. In one or two instances this appears so plainly, that the adjective middle, if added to the formative, would almost suggest the idea, as the middle person, or brother; middle clothing; the mid bird, i. e. between bird and beast, the bat. Others again seem to unite with the idea of the formative that of something within; as, something within the heart-grief; something in the water which agitates it; corn within the ear, &c. In several of the compounds the connexion is not easily traced. All the names, except two, (in the above example,) follow that of the formative.'-p. 58.

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We suspect, however, as we formerly stated, that this admirable and perhaps best practical attempt at an universal language was marred at an early period, by caprice or stupidity, or both; and that very few, certainly not a sixth part of the compound characters, are employed to represent the idea which would naturally be gested by the union of the component parts. One thing, however, is quite evident from this discovery of Mr. Marshman-those characters which he calls primitives give, in nine cases out of ten, the name of the compounds into which they enter, far more frequently than the radicals or elements govern the sense. Thus sin, the heart, has twelve derivatives, (we should rather say compounds,) six of which are pronounced sin, and six tsin. The primitive ngó, I, has twenty-seven derivatives, or compounds, every one of which, one excepted, has the identical name of ngó. The primitive tching combines with twenty-two of the elements, of which sixteen are precisely the same as that of the primitive, and the rest, except one, begin with the aspirated initial of the primitive. Of these primitives Dr. Marshman reckons up about twelve hun

dred which are simple and effective characters; whereas, of the 214 formatives or elements, there are only about eighty that enter extensively into composition: and hence he concludes that, as it is more reasonable to expect the mass of characters to be formed from twelve hundred ideas, modified by the elements in ten, twenty, or thirty ways, than from eighty modified each (as on this supposition they must be) in four or five hundred ways, we may consider the characters in question as primitives. The fact, we have no doubt, is against his theory in this respect. The efficient radicals or elements, as we said before, are the genera which communicate to the compound, (made by union with the Doctor's primitives,) a modification of the sense of the radical. Thus trees and shrubs of almost every kind arrange under the radical moo, wood; all the handicraft trades, labour, &c. under shoo, the hand; every modification of heat under ho, fire; all the passions and affections of the mind, as grief, joy, love, hatred, &c. under sin, the heart; all speech, tradition, history, antiquity, under koo, mouth; and these åre all keys or elements. It is true Dr. Marshman takes all these and the rest of the elementary characters into the number of his primitives, in which sense only, but in no other, can his theory be maintained. He has noticed, indeed, that the element generally governs the prevailing idea of the compound, and that the primitive gives it a name.

The number of monosyllables in the whole language, according to Dr. Marshman, amounts to 846; and these, he observes, with the exception of some provincial variations, are all the words by which the Chinese have conveyed their ideas to each other from time immemorial. Sir George Staunton makes them amount, with all their inflections and accentuations, to 1331; if to the twelve hundred primitives be added those elements which are used as primitives, we shall have a very close approximation to an equality of monosyllabic sounds and primitive characters, that is to say, each character will have its distinct name; whereas one name now serves for forty or fifty characters. Had Doctor Marshman examined what proportion the elements and primitives, in their simple state, bore to the whole of the 3000 characters of which the works of Confucius are composed, and found that proportion to be very considerable, we should then say, that the language, in the time of Confucius, was in its infancy; but a contrary conclusion would be drawn, if, as at the present day, characters compounded of the elements and primitives prevailed. Again: if the whole or the greater part of the primitives were found among these 3000 characters, it would go far to establish the validity of his theory. It is fair to presume that, if the character ngô, I, produce twenty-si✩

compounds bearing the same name, this same character, being found complete in all, must have existed before any of those compounds, and communicated its own name to them; and if twelve hundred of these primitives are found to appropriate to themselves very nearly every name or sound in the language, the inference is equally fair, that these twelve hundred symbols are the 'original characters of the language, but it would be indisputable, if in the most ancient writings of China these characters were found to predominate uncompounded by what Doctor Marshman calls the formatives of the language.

The next part of the work discusses the nature of the colloquial medium, which, being singular in its nature and utterly unlike any other language ancient or modern, the Doctor infers, safely enough, must have been in use before the invention of their charactersas speech necessarily precedes writing.' We noticed in a former Number, at considerable length, the system of initials and finals, and its analogy with the Sanscrit alphabet. To establish its claim to an original language, Mr. Marshman now examines the question how far it can be said to resemble the Hebrew and the Sanscrit, the two most ancient and only probable languages from which it could be derived. The Hebrew alphabet he finds to have five consonants which the Chinese have not, while the Chinese have eight not found in the Hebrew; sixteen probably may be deemed common to both. Then the Chinese language is purely monosyllabic and the Hebrew polysyllabic; the latter might easily spring out of the former, but it is scarcely conceivable that a polysyllabic language could be cut down to a language wholly composed of monosyllables. The numerous inflections of the Hebrew verbs are totally incompatible with the unchangeable inflexible monosyllable, which is at once a noun indeclinable, and a verb not to be conjugated, which in itself is incapable of taking either number, case, or gender; mood, tense, or person. Not content with stating these discrepancies, Mr. Marshman examines the speech of Judah to Joseph, in the 44th chapter of Genesis, which in the Hebrew contains two hundred and six words, sixteen of which are monosyllables; but of these sixteen, seven only are found in the Chinese language, and these seven we apprehend,though he does not say so, are merely symphonious and not synonimous. Another passage of the Bible, Abraham's intercession for Sodom, is found to contain two hundred and thirty words, of which ten only are monosyllables, and four of these are Chinese. But lest it should be objected that the two passages are too modern for the time when the Chinese language may be supposed to have been first formed, Dr. Marshman goes still farther back, and taking the maledictory prophecy of Noah, relative to his grandson Canaan, in twenty-six words he finds only one monosyllable; and he therefore thus concludes

If the Chinese formed their colloquial medium by selecting one word from twenty-nine, as in the first example, from fifty, as in the second, or even one from twenty-six, of those they were in the habit of hearing every moment, the point is decided-invention itself seems easy compared with this labour, But if they did not derive their colloquial medium from the language of Noah and his sons, the alternative is that they invented it wholly themselves'

The Doctor seems to take it for granted, that the language in which the history of Noah is related in the Old Testament, was actually the language spoken by Noah; for which we presume he has no authority either in sacred or profane history.

The similarity of the Sanscrit alphabet with the system of Chinese sounds, would seem, at first sight, to render the filiation of these two languages far more probable, though in their construction they differ more widely than the Chinese and the Hebrew. The Sanscrit verb is in fact much more inflected and modified than the Hebrew verb; the language has fewer monosyllables, and abounds more in sesquipedalian words than any other language we are acquainted with, not excepting the unpronounceable Mexi can compounds. Our author compares the Ramayuna with the Shee-king; in ten pages of the former, containing four hundred and fifty-nine words, he finds only thirteen monosyllables, of which seven do not occur in the Shee, nor are any two of them used to express the same idea in both languages.

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Though we do not altogether admire Doctor Marshman's manner of stating the question, nor approve of the mode in which he conducts the argument, we have very little doubt of the justness of his conclusions; still we are rather surprised that, in explaining the system of sounds, the tones, &c, of the Chinese colloquial medium, as he calls it, from the preface of Kang-hi's Dictionary, he did not take notice of the observations thereon in the same preface: had he done this he might have spared himself a great deal of unnecessary labour, as he would there have seen at once that this alphabetic system, or series of initials and finals, which is never used by the Chinese, nor once employed in the dictionary in which it is introduced, is of yery recent birth in China, and avowedly introduced from India by some Hindoo Brahmins. Mr. Morrison informs us that the Imperial Dictionary contains the following quotation from a work called Fan-tsih :- The litterati in the time of Han (A. D. 200) understood letters, but were unacquainted with the mother characters. The litterati on the left of the Great River knew the four tones, but were unacquainted with the seven sounds, Information respecting the seven sounds ori

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*The mother characters are used in modern dictionaries to point out the name of each character, by taking the initial of one and adding it to the final of the other: thus, tsai and ming would give the new monosyllable tsing.

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