ittle
ones the following remarkable sentence, "My too muchey solly you go
steamah; you no solly my."

All this is very absurd, no doubt; still it is _bona fide_ Chinese,
and illustrates very forcibly how an intelligible language may be
constructed of root-ideas arranged in logical sequence.

If the last word had now been said in reference to colloquial, it would
be as easy for us to learn to speak Chinese as it is for a Chinaman to
learn to speak Pidgin-English. There is, however, a great obstacle still
in the way of the student. The Chinese language is peculiarly lacking
in vocables; that is to say, it possesses very few sounds for the
conveyance of speech. The dialect of Peking is restricted to four
hundred and twenty, and as every word in the language must fall under
one or other of those sounds, it follows that if there are 42,000 words
in the language (and the standard dictionary contains 44,000), there
is an average of 100 words to each sound. Of course, if any sound
had less than 100 words attached to it, some other sound would have
proportionately more. Thus, accepting the average, we should have 100
things or ideas, all expressed in speech, for instance, by the one
single sound _I_.

The confusion likely to arise from such conditions needs not to be
enlarged upon; it is at once obvious, and probably gave rise to the
following sapient remark by a globe-trotting author, which I took from
a newspaper in England:--

"In China, the letter _I_ has one hundred and forty-five different ways
of being pronounced, and each pronunciation has a different meaning."

It would be difficult to squeeze more misleading nonsense into a smaller
compass. Imagine the agonies of a Chinese infant school, struggling
with the letter _I_ pronounced in 145 different ways, with a different
meaning to each! It will suffice to say, what everybody here present
must know, that Chinese is not in any sense an alphabetic language, and
that consequently there can be no such thing as "the letter _I_."

When closely examined, this great difficulty of many words with but one
common sound melts rapidly away, until there is but a fairly small
residuum with which the student has to contend. The same difficulty
confronts us, to a slighter extent, even in English. If I say, "I met a
bore in Broadway," I may mean one of several things. I may mean a tidal
wave, which is at once put out of court by the logic of circumstances.
Or I may mean a wild anima