In this “pidgin” English he can express himself as in Chinese by merely changing the positions of the words:—­

“He wantchee my.”  “My wantchee he.”

“My belong Englishman.”

“That knife belong my.”

Some years back, when I was leaving China for England with young children, their faithful Chinese nurse kept on repeating to the little ones the following remarkable sentence, “My too muchey solly you go steamah; you no solly my.”

All this is very absurd, no doubt; still it is bona fide Chinese, and illustrates very forcibly how an intelligible language may be constructed of root-ideas arranged in logical sequence.

If the last word had now been said in reference to colloquial, it would be as easy for us to learn to speak Chinese as it is for a Chinaman to learn to speak Pidgin-English.  There is, however, a great obstacle still in the way of the student.  The Chinese language is peculiarly lacking in vocables; that is to say, it possesses very few sounds for the conveyance of speech.  The dialect of Peking is restricted to four hundred and twenty, and as every word in the language must fall under one or other of those sounds, it follows that if there are 42,000 words in the language (and the standard dictionary contains 44,000), there is an average of 100 words to each sound.  Of course, if any sound had less than 100 words attached to it, some other sound would have proportionately more.  Thus, accepting the average, we should have 100 things or ideas, all expressed in speech, for instance, by the one single sound I.

The confusion likely to arise from such conditions needs not to be enlarged upon; it is at once obvious, and probably gave rise to the following sapient remark by a globe-trotting author, which I took from a newspaper in England:—­

“In China, the letter I has one hundred and forty-five different ways of being pronounced, and each pronunciation has a different meaning.”

It would be difficult to squeeze more misleading nonsense into a smaller compass.  Imagine the agonies of a Chinese infant school, struggling with the letter I pronounced in 145 different ways, with a different meaning to each!  It will suffice to say, what everybody here present must know, that Chinese is not in any sense an alphabetic language, and that consequently there can be no such thing as “the letter I.”

When closely examined, this great difficulty of many words with but one common sound melts rapidly away, until there is but a fairly small residuum with which the student has to contend.  The same difficulty confronts us, to a slighter extent, even in English.  If I say, “I met a bore in Broadway,” I may mean one of several things.  I may mean a tidal wave, which is at once put out of court by the logic of circumstances.  Or I may mean a wild animal, which also has circumstances against it.