will be found, among the well-to-do tradesmen and merchants,
many who can make themselves intelligible in something which
approximates to the dialect of Peking, not to mention that two out of
the above three cities are garrisoned by Manchu troops, who of course
speak that dialect as their native tongue.

Such is Mandarin. It may be compared to a limited extent with Urdu, the
camp language of India. It is obviously the form of colloquial which
should be studied by all, except those who have special interests in
special districts, in which case, of course, the _patois_ of the
locality comes to the front.

We will now suppose that the student has made up his mind to learn
Mandarin. The most natural thing for him, then, to do will be to look
around him for a grammar. He may have trouble in finding one. Such works
do actually exist, and they have been, for the most part, to quote a
familiar trade-mark, "made in Germany." They are certainly not made by
the Chinese, who do not possess, and never have possessed, in their
language, an equivalent term for grammar. The language is quite beyond
reach of the application of such rules as have been successfully deduced
from Latin and Greek.

The Chinese seem always to have spoken in monosyllables, and these
monosyllables seem always to have been incapable of inflection,
agglutination, or change of any kind. They are in reality root-ideas,
and are capable of adapting themselves to their surroundings, and of
playing each one such varied parts as noun, verb (transitive, neuter,
or even causal), adverb, and conjunction.

The word [wo] _wo_, which for convenience' sake I call "I," must be
rendered into English by "me" whenever it is the object of some other
word, which, also for convenience' sake, I call a verb. It has further
such extended senses as "egoistic" and "subjective."

For example: [wo ai ta] _wo ai t'a_.

The first of these characters, which is really the root-idea of "self,"
stands here for the pronoun of the first person; the last, which is
really the root-idea of "not self," "other," stands for the pronoun of
the third person; and the middle character for the root-idea of "love."

This might mean in English, "I love him," or "I love her," or "I love
it,"--for there is no gender in Chinese, any more than there is any other
indication of grammatical susceptibilities. We can only decide if "him,"
"her," or "it" is intended by the context, or by the circumstances of