ast 20 or 30 in everyday use--which are
strictly reserved for limited classes of things with specific
attributes. [Ch] _mei_, for instance, is the numerative of circular
objects such as coins and rings; [Ch] _k'o_ of small globular
objects--pearls, grains of rice, &c.; [Ch] _k'ou_ classifies things
which have a mouth--bags, boxes and so forth; [Ch] _chien_ is used of
all kinds of affairs; [Ch] _chang_ of chairs and sheets of paper; [Ch]
_chih_ (literally half a pair) is the numerative for various animals,
parts of the body, articles of clothing and ships; [Ch] _pa_ for things
which are grasped by a handle, such as fans and knives.

This by no means exhausts the list of devices by which the difficulties
of a monosyllabic language are successfully overcome. Mention need only
be made, however, of the system of "tones," which, as the most curious
and important of all, has been kept for the last.

The tones.

The tones may be defined as regular modulations of the voice by means of
which different inflections can be imparted to the same sound. They may
be compared with the half-involuntary modulations which express
emotional feeling in our words. To the foreign ear, a Chinese sentence
spoken slowly with the tones clearly brought out has a certain sing-song
effect. If we speak of the tones as a "device" adopted in order to
increase the number of vocables, this must be understood rather as a
convenient way of explaining their practical function than as a
scientific account of their origin. It is absurd to suppose the tones
were deliberately invented in order to fit each written character with a
separate sound. A tone may be said to be as much an integral part of the
word to which it belongs as the sound itself; like the sound, too, it is
not fixed once and for all, but is in a constant, though very gradual,
state of evolution. This fact is proved by the great differences of
intonation in the dialects. Theoretically, four tones have been
distinguished--the even, the rising, the sinking and the entering--each
of which falls again into an upper and a lower series. But only the
Cantonese dialect possesses all these eight varieties of tone (to which
a ninth has been added), while Pekingese, with which we are especially
concerned here, has no more than four: the even upper, the even lower,
the rising and the sinking. The history of the tones has yet to be
written, but it appears that down to the 3rd century B.C. the only tones