ABSTRACT
66. (34) In Chinese each word consists of one syllable, neither more nor less. The parts of speech are not distinguished: tá means, according to circumstances, great, much, magnitude, enlarge. Grammatical relations such as number, person, tense, case, etc., are not expressed by endings and similar expedients; the word in itself is invariable. If a noun is to be taken as plural, this as a rule must be gathered from the context; and it is only when there is any danger of misunderstanding, or when the notion of plurality is to be emphasised, that separate words'are added, e.g., kì, “some,” šú, “number”. 1 The most important part of Chinese grammar is that dealing with word-order: tá kuok = “great state,” or “great states”; but kuok tá means “the state is great,” or, if placed before some other word which can serve as a verb, “the greatness (size) of the state”; tsi῭ niu῭ “boys and girls,” but niu῭ tsi῭ “girl” (female child), etc. 2 Besides words properly so called, or, as the Chinese grammarians term them, “full words,” there are several “empty words” serving for grammatical purposes, often in a wonderfully clever and ingenious way. Thus čī 1 has besides other functions that of indicating a genitive relation more distinctly than it would be indicated by the mere position of the words; mîn (people) lik (power) is of itself sufficient to signify “the power of the people,” but the same notion is expressed more explicitly by mîn čī lik. The same expedient is used to indicate different sorts of connexion; if čī is placed after the subject of a sentence it makes it a genitive, thereby changing the sentence into a sort of subordinate clause: wâng paò mîn = “the king protects the people”; but if you say wâng čī paò mîn yèû (is like) ƒú (father) čī paò tsì, the whole may be rendered, by means of the English verbal noun, “the king's protecting the people is like the father's protecting his child”. Further, it is possible to change a whole sentence into a genitive; for instance, wâng paò mîn čī taò (manner) k'ò (can) ktén (see, be seen), “the manner in which the king protects (the manner of the king's protecting) his people is to be seen”; and in yet other positions čī can be used to join a word-group consisting of subject and verb, or of verb and object, as an attribute to a noun; we have participles to express the same modification of the idea: wâng paò čī mîn, “the people protected by the king”; paò mîn čī wâng, “a king protecting the people”. Observe here the ingenious method of distinguishing the active and passive voices by strictly adhering to the natural order and placing the subject before and the object after the verb. If we put ì before, and kú after, a single word, it means “on account of, because of” (cf. English for…'s sake); if we place a whole sentence between these “rackets” as we might term them, they are a sort of conjunction, and must be translated “because”.
