and are now all pronounced _ch_. Again, all
consonantal endings in _t_ and _k_, such as survive in Cantonese and
other dialects, have entirely disappeared from Pekingese, and _n_ and
_ng_ are the only final consonants remaining. Vowel sounds, on the other
hand, have been proportionately developed, such compounds as _ao, ia,
iao, iu, ie, ua_ occurring with especial frequency. (It must be
understood, of course, that the above are only equivalents, not in all
cases very exact, for the sounds of a non-alphabetic language.)

An immediate consequence of this paucity of vocables is that one and the
same sound has to do duty for different words. Reckoning the number of
words that an educated man would want to use in conversation at
something over four thousand, it is obvious that there will be an
average of ten meanings to each sound employed. Some sounds may have
fewer meanings attached to them, but others will have many more. Thus
the following represent only a fraction of the total number of words
pronounced _shih_ (something like the "shi" in shirt): [Ch] "history,"
[Ch] "to employ," [Ch] "a corpse," [Ch] "a market," [Ch] "an army," [Ch]
"a lion," [Ch] "to rely on," [Ch] "to wait on," [Ch] "poetry," [Ch]
"time," [Ch] "to know," [Ch] "to bestow," [Ch] "to be," [Ch] "solid,"
[Ch] "to lose," [Ch] "to proclaim," [Ch] "to look at," [Ch] "ten," [Ch]
"to pick up," [Ch] "stone," [Ch] "generation," [Ch] "to eat," [Ch] "a
house," [Ch] "a clan," [Ch] "beginning," [Ch] "to let go," [Ch] "to
test," [Ch] "affair," [Ch] "power," [Ch] "officer," [Ch] "to swear,"
[Ch] "to pass away," [Ch] "to happen." It would be manifestly impossible
to speak without ambiguity, or indeed to make oneself intelligible at
all, unless there were some means of supplementing this deficiency of
sounds. As a matter of fact, several devices are employed through the
combination of which confusion is avoided. One of these devices is the
coupling of words in pairs in order to express a single idea. There is a
word [Ch] _ko_ which means "elder brother." But in speaking, the sound
_ko_ alone would not always be easily understood in this sense. One must
either reduplicate it and say _ko-ko_, or prefix [Ch] (_ta_, "great")
and say _ta-ko_. Simple reduplication is mostly confined to family
appellations and such adverbial phrases as [Ch][Ch] _man-man_, "slowly."
But there is a much larger class of pairs, in which each of the two
components has the same meaning. Examples are: