ation of the mere sound of words would have been
perfectly useless, and it was absolutely necessary to resort to
hieroglyphical writing, enlarged by the introduction of determinative
signs. Nearly the whole immense dictionary of Chinese--at least
twenty-nine thirtieths--consists of combined signs, one part
indicating the general sound, the other determining its special
meaning. With such a system of writing it was possible to represent
Chinese, but impossible to convey either the sound or the meaning of
any other language. Besides, some of the most common sounds--such as
r, b, d, and the short a--are unknown in Chinese.

How, then, were the translators to render Sanskrit names in Chinese?
The most rational plan would have been to select as many Chinese signs
as there were Sanskrit letters, and to express one and the same letter
in Sanskrit always by one and the same sign in Chinese; or, if the
conception of a consonant without a vowel, and of a vowel without a
consonant, was too much for a Chinese understanding, to express at
least the same syllabic sound in Sanskrit, by one and the same
syllabic sign in Chinese. A similar system is adopted at the present
day, when the Chinese find themselves under the necessity of writing
the names of Lord Palmerston or Sir John Bowring; but, instead of
adopting any definite system of transcribing, each translator seems to
have chosen his own signs for rendering the sounds of Sanskrit words,
and to have chosen them at random. The result is that every Sanskrit
word as transcribed by the Chinese Buddhists is a riddle which no
ingenuity is able to solve. Who could have guessed that 'Fo-to,' or
more frequently 'Fo,' was meant for Buddha? 'Ko-lo-keou-lo' for
Rahula, the son of Buddha? 'Po-lo-nai' for Benares? 'Heng-ho' for
Ganges? 'Niepan' for Nirv_ana_? 'Chamen' for _S_rama_n_a? 'Feito' for
Veda? 'Tcha-li' for Kshattriya? 'Siu-to-lo' for _S_udra? 'Fan' or
'Fan-lon-mo' for Brahma? Sometimes, it is true, the Chinese
endeavoured to give, besides the sounds, a translation of the meaning
of the Sanskrit words. But the translation of proper names is always
very precarious, and it required an intimate knowledge of Sanskrit and
Buddhist literature to recognise from these awkward translations the
exact form of the proper names for which they were intended. If, in a
Chinese translation of 'Thukydides,' we read of a person called
'Leader of the people,' we might guess his name to have been
Demagogos