The word [wo] wo, which for convenience’ sake I call “I,” must be rendered into English by “me” whenever it is the object of some other word, which, also for convenience’ sake, I call a verb.  It has further such extended senses as “egoistic” and “subjective.”

    For example:  [wo ai ta] wo ai t’a.

The first of these characters, which is really the root-idea of “self,” stands here for the pronoun of the first person; the last, which is really the root-idea of “not self,” “other,” stands for the pronoun of the third person; and the middle character for the root-idea of “love.”

This might mean in English, “I love him,” or “I love her,” or “I love it,”—­for there is no gender in Chinese, any more than there is any other indication of grammatical susceptibilities.  We can only decide if “him,” “her,” or “it” is intended by the context, or by the circumstances of the case.

Now if we were to transpose what I must still call the pronouns, although they are not pronouns except when we make them so, we should have—­

    [ta ai wo] t’a ai wo

“he, she, or it loves me,” the only change which the Chinese words have undergone being one of position; while in English, in addition to the inflection of the pronouns, the “love” of the first person becomes “loves” in the third person.

Again, supposing we wished to write down—­

    “People love him (or her),”

we should have—­

    [ren ai ta] jen ai t’a,

in which once more the noticeable feature is that the middle character, although passing from the singular to the plural number, suffers no change of any kind whatever.

Further, the character for “man” is in the plural simply because such a rendering is the only one which the genius of the Chinese language will here tolerate, helped out by the fact that the word by itself does not mean “a man,” but rather what we may call the root-idea of humanity.

Such terms as “a man,” or “six men,” or “some men,” or “many men,” would be expressed each in its own particular way.

“All men,” for instance, would involve merely the duplication of the character jen:—­

    [ren ren ai ta] jen jen ai t’a.

It is the same with tenses in Chinese.  They are not brought out by inflection, but by the use of additional words.

[lai] lai is the root-idea of “coming,” and lends itself as follows to the exigencies of conjugation:—­

Standing alone, it is imperative:—­

    [lai] Lai! = “come!” “here!”

    [wo lai] wo lai = “I come, or am coming.”

    [ta lai] t’a lai = “he comes, or is coming.”

And by inserting [bu] pu, a root-idea of negation,—­

    [ta bu lai] t’a pu lai = “he comes not, or is not coming.”