gerated as it sounds, there is a very
substantial amount of truth. Every Chinese character is an indivisible
unit, representing a sound and standing for a root-idea. Being free from
inflection or agglutination of any kind, it is incapable of indicating
in itself either gender, number or case, voice, mood, tense or person.
Of European languages, English stands nearest to Chinese in this
respect, whence it follows that the construction of a hybrid jargon like
pidgin English presents fewer difficulties than would be the case, for
instance, with pidgin German. For pidgin English simply consists in
taking English words and treating them like Chinese characters, that is,
divesting them of all troublesome inflections and reducing them to a set
of root-ideas arranged in logical sequence. "You wantchee my no
wantchee" is nothing more nor less than literally rendered Chinese:
[Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] "Do you want me or not?" But we may go further, and
say that no Chinese character can be definitely regarded as being any
particular part of speech or possessing any particular function
absolutely, apart from the general tenor of its context. Thus, taken
singly, the character [Ch] conveys only the general idea "above" as
opposed to "below." According to its place in the sentence and the
requirements of common sense, it may be a noun meaning "upper person"
(that is, a ruler); an adjective meaning "upper," "topmost" or "best";
an adverb meaning "above"; a preposition meaning "upon"; and finally a
verb meaning "to mount upon," or "to go to." [Ch] is a character that
may usually be translated "to enter" as in [Ch][Ch] "to enter a door";
yet in the locution [Ch][Ch] "enter wood," the verb becomes causative,
and the meaning is "to put into a coffin." It would puzzle grammarians
to determine the precise grammatical function of any of the words in the
following sentence, with the exception of [Ch] (an interrogative, by the
way, which here happens to mean "why" but in other contexts is
equivalent to "how," "which" or "what"): [Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch] "Affair why
must ancient," or in more idiomatic English, "Why necessarily stick to
the ways of the ancients in such matters?" Or take a proverbial saying
like [Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch][Ch], which may be correctly rendered "The less
a man has seen, the more he has to wonder at." It is one thing, however,
to translate it correctly, and another to explain how this translation
can be inferred from the individual words,