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CHINESE LANGUAGE AND WRITING 117 140th "key," is ao, "gras," 1,431 symbols; the 85th "key," shui, "water," 1,354 characters are classified internally according to the number of strokes of the phonetic element.
門西瓜日:下一
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系主旨下午 Fig. 62—The 214 "keys" of Chinese writing
The direction of writing Chinese is vertical, from top to bottom; the columns begin on the right-hand side of the page.
Chinese writing being too complicated, not many peoples adopted it or adapted it to their language; but the Japanese, the Annamites and some non-Chinese peoples of China did so. It has, however, influenced externally many other scripts, particularly the Mongolian scripts and the Korean alphabet.
REPRESENTATION OF CHINESE BY LATIN ALPHABET
The difficulties in representing Chinese by the Roman script are very great. As long ago as 1859, Sir Thomas Wade devised a system of Romanization for Chinese words. It is still the most widely accepted among English speakers, and I have used it here. A new system, called Grayer Romatayh (or G.W.), meaning "National Language Latin Script," was promulgated by the Chinese Ministry of Education in 1928. In this new system, aspirates and tones are indicated not by auxiliary signs or
