Sept. 21.
In his sermon at the Embassy theatre on Sunday Dr. Yui referred to the effort mide by the Republican government to make the Peking dialect the "universal Janguage" of China. It is now some ten years since the Government of that day introduced a phonetic system to represent all the sounds of the spoken lange uage and decreed that the sym-bois should be taught in national schools, Some progress has, undoubtedly, been made, Many students have mastered the system but, nationally, its effect has been negligible, Language differentiates man from the animal world, There is no animal that can speak and no man—with the exception of those with defective organs—who cannot, Scientists are fond of speaking of the "anthropos alalas," the speechless man, and arguing as to the date of his appearance on earth, But giving a theory a Greek name will not transform it into a fact and not the slightest trace of this supposed ancestor of our race has ever been found. As far back history goes. even the unwritten history of the cave dwellers, man was a talkative being. The invention of a language is one of the greatest feats accomplished by man. Children play at it and grown up scholars attempted it as we see Volapuk and Esperanto. But these are no more inventing a language de novo than a carpenter is creating material when he saws a tree into planks, Take the greatest philologist on earth and say to him "Go to, make us a new language without using any of the existing forms" and [he would be as helpless as the aforesaid carpenter without lwood. Since this is 0, it is a staggering fact that the rudest races have all succeeded inethis difficult task and some of their Tanguages are as highly developed as those of the nations we call civilized.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.