the case.

Now if we were to transpose what I must still call the pronouns,
although they are not pronouns except when we make them so, we should
have--

[ta ai wo] _t'a ai wo_

"he, she, _or_ it loves me," the only change which the Chinese words
have undergone being one of position; while in English, in addition to
the inflection of the pronouns, the "love" of the first person becomes
"loves" in the third person.

Again, supposing we wished to write down--

"People love him (or her),"

we should have--

[ren ai ta] _jen ai t'a_,

in which once more the noticeable feature is that the middle character,
although passing from the singular to the plural number, suffers no
change of any kind whatever.

Further, the character for "man" is in the plural simply because such a
rendering is the only one which the genius of the Chinese language will
here tolerate, helped out by the fact that the word by itself does not
mean "_a_ man," but rather what we may call the root-idea of humanity.

Such terms as "a man," or "six men," or "some men," or "many men," would
be expressed each in its own particular way.

"All men," for instance, would involve merely the duplication of the
character _jen_:--

[ren ren ai ta] _jen jen ai t'a_.

It is the same with tenses in Chinese. They are not brought out by
inflection, but by the use of additional words.

[lai] _lai_ is the root-idea of "coming," and lends itself as follows to
the exigencies of conjugation:--

Standing alone, it is imperative:--

[lai] _Lai!_ = "come!" "here!"

[wo lai] _wo lai_ = "I come, _or_ am coming."

[ta lai] _t'a lai_ = "he comes, _or_ is coming."

And by inserting [bu] _pu_, a root-idea of negation,--

[ta bu lai] _t'a pu lai_ = "he comes not, _or_ is not coming."

To express an interrogative, we say,--

[ta lai bu lai] _t'a lai pu lai_ = "he come no come?" _i.e._ "is he
coming?"

submitting the two alternatives for the person addressed to choose from
in reply.

The indefinite past tense is formed by adding the word [liao] _liao_ or
_lo_ "finished":--

[ta lai liao] _t'a lai lo_ = "he come finish," = "he has come."

This may be turned into the definite past tense by inserting some
indication of time; _e.g._

[ta zao shang lai liao] = "he came this morning."

Here we see that the same words may be indefinite or definite according
to circumstances.

It is perhaps more startling to find th