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PREFACE.
capital as given by Sir T. F. Wade in his Hsin Ching Lu and Tzŭ Erh Chỉ. At the same time, in order to secure as near an approach as possible to uniformity in all the volumes of the Sacred Books of the East, the letters employed were made to conform to those in Professor Max Müller's Scheme for the Transliteration of Oriental Alphabets. It was not easy at first to do this, for Chinese, having no alphabet, reluctated against being made to appear as if it had; but use has more than reconciled me to the method now employed. It was not possible to introduce into the table all the diphthongs in which Chinese speech is rich. The reader has to be informed that i before another vowel or a diphthong approximates to the sound of y, so that the whole utterance is still monosyllabic. The powers of , and ze must be heard before they can be appreciated.
To call the attention of the reader to passages in the Sha, embodying, more or less distinctly, religious ideas, an asterisk (*) will be found appended to them.
J. L. OXFORD, 18th April, 1879.
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