Professor Kidd, speaking of his instructors in the Mandarin and Fo-kien dialects respectively, says:  “The teachers in both cases read the same books, composed in the same style, and attached precisely the same ideas to the written symbols, but could not understand each other in conversation.”  Moreover, besides these sounds attaching to the Chinese characters when read in the dialect of Fo-kien, thus discrepant from the sounds used in reading the same characters in the Mandarin dialect, yet another class of sounds is used to express the same ideas in the Fo-kien dialect when it is used colloquially and without reference to written symbols! (Kidd’s China, etc., pp. 21-23.)

The term Fokien dialect in the preceding passage is ambiguous, as will be seen from the following remarks, which have been derived from the Preface and Appendices to the Rev. Dr. Douglas’s Dictionary of the Spoken Language of Amoy,[6] and which throw a distinct light on the subject of this note:—­

“The vernacular or spoken language of Amoy is not a mere colloquial dialect or patois, it is a distinct language—­one of the many and widely differing spoken languages which divide among them the soil of China.  For these spoken languages are not dialects of one language, but cognate languages, bearing to each other a relation similar to that between Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, or between English, Dutch, German, and Danish.  The so-called ‘written language’ is indeed uniform throughout the whole country, but that is rather a notation than a language.  And this written language, as read aloud from books, is not spoken in any place whatever, under any form of pronunciation.  The most learned men never employ it as a means of ordinary oral communication even among themselves.  It is, in fact, a dead language, related to the various spoken languages of China, somewhat as Latin is to the languages of Southern Europe.

“Again:  Dialects, properly speaking, of the Amoy vernacular language are found (e.g.) in the neighbouring districts of Changchew, Chinchew, and Tungan, and the language with its subordinate dialects is believed to be spoken by 8 or 10 millions of people.  Of the other languages of China the most nearly related to the Amoy is the vernacular of Chau-chau-fu, often called ‘the Swatow dialect,’ from the only treaty-port in that region.  The ancestors of the people speaking it emigrated many years ago from Fuh-kien, and are still distinguished there by the appellation Hok-lo, i.e. people from Hok-kien (or Fuh-kien).  This language differs from the Amoy, much as Dutch differs from German, or Portuguese from Spanish.

“In the Island of Hai-nan (Hai-lam), again (setting aside the central aborigines), a language is spoken which differs from Amoy more than that of Swatow, but is more nearly related to these two than to any other of the languages of China.