Book Title: Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind
Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications
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CHINESE LANGUAGE AND
WRITING
99 suggested to term them "polytonic." The number of tones varies from language to language, from dialect to dialect; for instance, Siamese and Cantonese have each six, Burmese has but two tones.
The possible combinations of the 450 or so Chinese syllables amount thanks to the tones to about 1,200. Some dialects consist of a greater number of different syllables; the Peking dialect is said to consist of about 1,380, the Canton dialect of 1,868, and the Amoy dialect of about 2,500. Even so, the number of words would still be insufficient for the speech of a highly civilized people, if it did
國一五
中二六
子太三七
英-四八
英國
中國·英國人
Fig. 51-Modern Chinese characters
女子好人 國
。
十
女中
12
B
D
1, Jén, "man," "person," "human," 2, Ni, "girl," "woman," "female." 3, Tzu, "child," “son," "posterity." 4. (composed of symbols 2 and 3), Hao, "good," "well," "fond of," "very.” 5, Kuo, "kingdom" or "country" surrounded with boundaries, 6, Chung, "centre," "middle," "inside." 7. Ta or da, "great," "noble," "very." 8, Ying, "superior" used for Eng(land), 9, 1 (ee), "one." 10, Erh, "two." 11, San, "three." 12, Szu, "four." 13. Wu, "ive." 14, Lu,“six " ts. Ch'i, “seven.” 16, Pa,"eight." 17. Chiu, "nine." 18, Shil, ten." A, (2+1), Nü-jén, "female" "person" "woman." B, (6+5), Chungkun, "middle" +"kingdom"-"China." C, (8 5), Ying-kun, "Ying (England)" + "kingdom" "England." D, (8+5+1). Ying-kuo-jén, "English" +"kingdom"
"Englishman."
not include very many homonyms, that is, words with the same sound but different meaning. If these homonyms were to be written in alphabetic script, the ambiguity would certainly be much greater than it is in the present writing, in which, for example, for the sound shih there are 239 characters (54, 40, 79, and 66 respectively for the different tones). According to Professor Karlgren, in the Mandarin dialect (see belote) there are 69 words which are pronounced i, 59 shih, 29 ku, and so forth, and the average number of words for each syllable is ro. However, thanks to the means of variation (that is, the tones), each word is pronounced in a different musical note, and the Chinese language has been able
