To the Editor of the "Nonra-Carva Datty News."
;—The problem of how best to teach overworked among the Chie has lon; reading to the aged, the ignorant and the
been the subject of discussion. The difticulties attending their learning the character are so great as to render it a practical impossibility, nor does the Romanised system appear to give unqualified satisfaction to its advocates, So far as I know the use of Pitman's shorthand alphabet has never been suggested, yet it is admirably adapted to n monosyllabic language.
has at least three advantages over the Roman. First, the simplicity of its outlines, The letters to which we have been accustomed from childhood, forgetful as we are of the time when we struggled over pothooks and hangers, appear quite simple to us, but not so to the man who sees them for the first time. Take for example the elaborate signs for "b" and "g" and compare them with the shorthand, a simple stroke in each case, or the still more intricate "a" expressed in shorthand by a dot. An intelligent Chinese could learn to read and write the shorthand alphabet in a hour, and. a foreigner could read it without any previous study by merely having a key before him.
Second, it provides for phonetic spelling because it has a separate sign for every sound. In the Koman alphabet one letter has to stand for several different sounds, which must necessarily make it more difficult to leora. For the tones in Chinese and the vowels which do not occur in English, new signs could be invented.
Third, the same letters are used both for printing and writing.
Acertain Chinese city, it is said, in one day (figuratively speaking) abandoned the use of rushlights for electricity, thereby omitting all the intermediate steps in the progress of artificial lighting, and why. should not the Chinese discard their cumbersome method of writing in favour of the one that has already been adapted to so many languages, the best and swiftest that has ever been inyenied, viz, Pitman's shorthand system.
I commend this to the consideration of those who have a greater knowledge of the Chinese language than,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.