ir written language contains
about eighty thousand pictures, each picture representing a thing or
idea. And these pictures must be committed to memory. This is hard work,
and not even the wisest Chinese professor can learn them all. But now
comes a difficulty. For, of course, where there are so many words and
so few sounds, many different words have to be called by the same sound.
How then are they to tell, when several different things have exactly
the same name which of them is meant?

[Illustration: REBUS-PICTURES FROM THE OLD CHINESE, SHOWING THE
BEGINNINGS OF PICTURE-WRITING.

1. A Month. (From a picture of the moon.) 2. The Eye. 3. A Horse. 4. An
Ax. 5. Rain. 6. Face. 7. A Dragon. 8. Bamboo. 9. Rhinoceros. 10. Dawn.
(From the rising sun.)]

We have such words. For instance, there is Bill, the name of a boy; and
bill, the beak of a bird; there is bill, an old weapon, and bill, a
piece of money; there is bill, an article over which legislatures
debate, and bill, a claim for payment of money; besides bills of
exchange, bills of lading, and so forth. But Chinese is full of such
words of a single syllable, _yen_, for instance, which, like bill, means
many very different things. So they chose a number of little pictures,
and agreed that these should be used as "keys." The Chinese "keys" were
used like the Egyptian "determinative signs," of which I told you. Each
"key" meant that the sign or signs near which it stood belonged to some
large general set of things, like things of the vegetable, mineral, or
animal kingdom, forests, mines, or seas, air, or water, or of persons,
like gods or men. It was like the game called Throwing Light, in which
you guess the article by narrowing down the field until certain what it
is.

But there Chinese writing stopped short, thousands of years ago. There
it is to-day. There are now two hundred and fourteen of these "keys,"
and, by intense application, Chinamen learn to use their method with
surprising quickness and success.

The Japanese acted toward Chinese writing much as the Phoenicians did
toward Egyptian writing. The Japanese, a very intelligent people, made
what you have learned to know as a syllabary, out of signs taken from
the Chinese symbols. It is called a syllabary, you remember, because
each sign stood in their language for a syllable. They had to do this,
because, while Chinese is all short syllables, Japanese is a language of
much longer words even than ours. They cu