In reviewing, some months ago, an arti-clo in the Missionary Recorder from the pon of the Rey.—Galick, we pointed out how consonant with the principles of Language was his proposal tu substitute the Roman tenues and medium, for the present complicated system of uuaspirated and aspirated letters adopted in all modern text books of Chinese. Not only did the proposed change mark more clearly the affinities of the original roots, and enable the student to trace them readily through their dialectic changes, bat it substituted fur an artificial system, misleading. to the beginner, one readily seized by the eye and retained in the memory, and which at the same time marked the trae philological structure of the language. Whether we call the sounds g, d, b, as compared with k, t, p, sonants and surds, mediw and revues, soft and hard letters, matters little, the distinction may be sammed up by the explanation that, whereas in the pronunciation of' the former some trace of voice remains, in the Jatter this trace is cut off abruptly by the contact of the vocal organs. This contact, amongst the majority of the Chinese dialects, is more and complete than in corres-Tably, on the principle of Tuexs a non ponding Buropean sounds; hence pro-
Tucendo, the so-called aspirated sounds of the Chinese Janguage. To quote Max Muller's lectures on the science of language, vol. LI, AMI consonants are really checks, and their character consists in their producing for time a complete cessation of audible breath or voice. Both p and therefore, are momentary negations of breath and voice; or, a3 the Hindu gvammarians say, both are formed by complete contact, But differs from pin xo far as, in order to pronounce it, the breath must have been changed by, the glottis into voice, which voice, when ther loud or whispered, partly precedes partly follows the check." "Adopting then, for Chinese consonants, the natare al divisions into surds and sonaute, let us see how this division \will suit the other sounds of the language. Besides consonants or checks associated with vowels, we find other modifications of sound in the various " breathings" produced by narrowing different portions of the throat or Inrynx. So numerous are they in some languages, that their tabulation or proper representation by letters is a matter of considerable difficulty. In no respect do the! ordinary Roman characters, taken from a language be it remembered by no means ich in these sounds, fail so mach as in their representation of the various; breathings—a failure the more disheartening that the various modern languages of Europe, while all forced to! employ combinations of letters to ex-' press these sounds, have each struck out a separate and independent system of their own, not one of which, moreover, attains the requisite phonetic simplicity or correctness. Like consonants, breathings are to be divided into two classes—the spiritus asper, and the spiritus lenis. The simplest form of the first is expressed by our letter 1, the latter is heard in the slight babble which accompanies the pronunciation of words such as old. art, ache, or more nearly in the Cockney pronunciation of my and, riy'eart, The Chinese language possesses comparatively few breathings, bat such as do exist may readily be tabulated, and will be found to fail as readily into their places as the consonants. Beginning then with, we may notice two sounds of the letter, simple, the other produced by tongue against the uvula, In Chinese we may hear the sounds in breathings as hi, i; Woo, yao. Corresponding with these again are the sounds of ¢, and sh, with their correspondent lenes z, and zh; the former however not being complete in Chinese, which probably possesses no pure sound. The Intter is, however, very marked, and may be heard in its purity in such words as shen and jen, the French 7 being at once a readier and apparently less barbaric way of uniting the sound, than the abnormal combination zh. The third series is likewise incomplete in Chinese, which ses no words corresponding with the aspirate th and but one f (unless in some of the const dialects) for the labial breathing. The last breathing is fally represented in the mandarin dialects by the sounds and w. With the exception of the compound sounds fs and cli, the above may be considered as having exhausted the consonantal alphabet of the Chinese, with the exception of the three nasal cheoks ug, n, m, corresponding in turn with the consonants q, d, b, or their and the thrills 2 and rh, jounds fs and ch follow the like division with the consonants into surds and sonants, which may be repre. sented by the characters ds and gh respectively. Twenty-four letters or modifications of letters will thus express the normal sounds of the language, and by means of these twenty-four, all sounds, so far at least as the more regular dialects are concerned, can be readily represented. As we before suggested, we cannot hope to express the dialectic sounds of any language by the phonetics of another. How feeble are the attempts to write the sounds of even such cognate Janguingesas French and English, is known to all stadents, who have endeavoured to make use of such books as "French without a master." With Chinese it is an equal impossibility, an impossibi. lity the more complicated, as there exist so many dialects, many with sounds as radically differing as French and English. The attempt to represent these dialectic differences has been at the bottom of most of the dificulties of Chineseorthography. Whether we take up Wade's Zsu Erk Chi or the translations of the Bible into Ningpo, Shanghai or Nanking vernacular, we find the same helpless jargon of letters to represent sounds not existing in ordinary English. Were, on the contrary, the plain sheet of Chinese sounds placed before the student, and were ho taught their equivalent in the dialect he was learning, much of this redundency would be done away with, while the philological connection of the dialects would be preserved. Totake one instance, what so easy as to learn that in the normal Peking dialect 1, before i, e, and %, becomes soft, and h before similar letters is sibilated. Those two represent the main consonantal changes. The new rale would apply to Ningpo, with the addition that the consonantal checks are not so sharp but that the surds and sonants are pronounced mach as in English. The dialectic change of y into 2g, and iw and w into v are equally simple; while. no one who has gone through the task of learning French nasals would find any difficulty in rendering the sounds of final n in the Shanghai and other dialects. Changes like these constitute, in fact the main differences between the dialects of the empire; they are extremely regular in their occurrence, 80 much 80 that once pointed out in any patois it becomes a matter of comparative ease to reduce them toa few short rules. The experiment of simplityiug the present unsatisfactory orthography adopted for the Chinese dialects, is at least worth consideration.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.