To return to Chinese.  In the first place, although there are no doubt 42,000 separate written characters in the Chinese language, about one-tenth of that number, 4200, would more than suffice for the needs of an average speaker.  Adopting this scale, we have 420 sounds and 4200 words, or ten words to each sound,—­still a sufficient hindrance to anything like certain intelligibility of speech.  But this is not the whole case.  The ten characters, for instance, under each sound, are distributed over four separate groups, formed by certain modulations of the voice, known as Tones, so that actually there would be only an average of 21/2 words liable to absolute confusion.  Thus [yan1] yen^1 means “smoke”; [yan2] yen^2 means “salt”; [yan3] yen^3 means “an eye”; and [yan4] yen^4 means “a goose.”

These modulations are not readily distinguished at first; but the ear is easily trained, and it soon becomes difficult to mistake them.

Nor is this all.  The Chinese, although their language is monosyllabic, do not make an extensive use of monosyllables in speech to express a single thing or idea.  They couple their words in pairs.

Thus, for “eye” they would say, not yen, which strictly means “hole,” or “socket,” but yen ching, the added word ching, which means “eyeball,” tying down the term to the application required, namely, “eye.”

In like manner it is not customary to talk about yen, “salt,” as we do, but to restrict the term as required in each case by the addition of some explanatory word; for instance, [bai yan] “white salt,” i.e. “table salt”; [he yan] “black salt,” i.e. “coarse salt”; all of which tends very much to prevent confusion with other words pronounced in the same tone.

There are also certain words used as suffixes, which help to separate terms which might otherwise be confused.  Thus [guo3] kuo^3 means “to wrap,” and [guo3] kuo^3 means “fruit,” the two being identical in sound and tone.  And yao kuo might mean either “I want fruit” or “I want to wrap.”  No one, however, says kuo for “fruit,” but kuo tzu.  The suffix tzu renders confusion impossible.

Of course there is no confusion in reading a book, where each thing or idea, although of the same sound and tone, is represented by a different symbol.

On the whole, it may be said that misconceptions in the colloquial are not altogether due to the fact that the Chinese language is poorly provided with sounds.  Many persons, otherwise gifted, are quite unable to learn any foreign tongue.

Let us now turn to the machinery by means of which the Chinese arrest the winged words of speech, and give to mere thought and utterance a more concrete and a more lasting form.

The written language has one advantage over the colloquial:  it is uniformly the same all over China; and the same document is equally intelligible to natives of Peking and Canton, just as the Arabic and Roman numerals are understood all over Europe, although pronounced differently by various nations.