o employ,_ or
_a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time,
poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a
house,_ and all such things as that;--I mention a few out of the
list by way of example.* Now of course, were that all to be said
about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused: would
think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about
poetry, and so on. But there is a way of throwing a little
breathing in, a kind of hiatus: thus _Ts'in_ meant one country,
and _Tsin_ another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them,
for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well. That
would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or
billiard-balls, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite
Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less
cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case. Still that
would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest
literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is. Then you
come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it. You
pronounce _shih_ one tone--you sing it on the right note, so to
say, and it means _poetry;_ you take that tone away, and give
it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes _a
corpse:_--as, one way, and another I have often tried to impress
on you it really does.--Of course the hieroglyphs, the written
words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you
have a vocabulary indeed. But you see that the spoken language
depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of
elements from those all our languages depend on. We have solid
words that you can spell: articles built up with the bricks of
sound-stuff we call letters: _c-a-t_ cat, _d-o-g_ dog, and so
on;--but their words, no; nothing so tangible: all depends on
little silences, small hiatuses in the vocalizition,--and above
all, _musical tones._ Now then, which is the more primitive?
Which is nearer the material or intellectual, and which, the
spiritual, pole?

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* _Encyclopaedia Britannica:_ article, China: Language.
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More primitive--I do not know. Only I think when the Stars of
Morning sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy;
when primeval humanity first felt stirring within it the Divine
fire and essence of the Lords of Mind; when the Sons of the Fire
mist came down, and found habitation for themselves in the bodies
of our ancesto