gard to
the colloquial, it is hardly possible to do more than consider it in the
form or forms in which it exists at the present day throughout the
empire of China. Although Chinese, like other living languages, must
have undergone gradual changes in the past, so little can be stated with
certainty about these changes that an accurate survey of its evolution
is quite out of the question. Obviously a different method is required
when we come to the written characters. The familiar line, "Litera
scripta manet, volat irrevocabile verbum," is truer perhaps of Chinese
than of any other tongue. We have hardly any clue as to how Chinese was
spoken or pronounced in any given district 2000 years ago, although
there are written remains dating from long before that time; and in
order to gain an insight into the structure of the characters now
existing, it is necessary to trace their origin and development.

The dialects.

Beginning with the colloquial, then, and taking a linguistic survey of
China, we find not one spoken language but a number of dialects, all
clearly of a common stock, yet differing from one another as widely as
the various Romance languages in southern Europe--say, French, Italian
and Spanish. Most of these dialects are found fringing the coast-line of
China, and penetrating but a comparatively short way into the interior.
Starting from the province of Kwang-tung in the south, where the
Cantonese and farther inland the Hakka dialects are spoken, and
proceeding northwards, we pass in succession the following dialects:
Swatow, Amoy--these two may almost be regarded as one--Foochow, Wenchow
and Ningpo. Farther north we come into the range of the great dialect
popularly known as Mandarin (_Kuan hua_ or "official language"), which
sweeps round behind the narrow strip of coast occupied by the various
dialects above-mentioned, and dominates a hinterland constituting nearly
four-fifths of China proper. Mandarin, of which the dialect of Peking,
the capital since 1421, is now the standard form, comprises a
considerable number of sub-dialects, some of them so closely allied that
the speakers of one are wholly intelligible to the speakers of another,
while others (e.g. the vernaculars of Yangchow, Hankow or Mid-China and
Ss[)u]-ch'uan) may almost be considered as separate dialects. Among all
these, Cantonese is supposed to approximate most nearly to the primitive
language of antiquity, whereas Pekingese perhaps has rece