Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan (V. 21) Book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TOUCHING BURMESE, JAPANESE, CHINESE, AND KOREAN. By E. H. Pahkek, Esq. [Head Feb. 15th, 1893.] Last year Mr. Percival Lowell published in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan a very readable article upon A Comparison of the Japanese and Burmese Languages, prefaced by some remarks alike thoughtful and interesting, upon the inevitable decay of all spoken tongues, checked to a certain extent w ben the stage of writing phonetically is reached. The Burmese and Japanese both learnt to read and write, he goes on to say, some twelve [eay, rather fifteen] centuries ago, the former forming their kana out of the Chinese characters, and the Burmese out of the Pali script. " With " the Chinese the case, though different, was yet the same ; " for, though the Middle Kingdom had at that time a " long literary career behind it, its characters were symbols "of ideas, not sounds, and therefore quite powerless to " check phonetic change." But there can be little doubt that the Japanese and the Burmese were both more or less familiar with Chinese and Pali writing, respectively, some considerable time before special syllabaries and alphabets were invented for them. This, however, is a trifling matter, which does not nffect the main question at issue. Yet, as to Chinese, Mr. Lowell's view is open to revision. In a great measure the Chinesecharacters, possessing as they do rather potentialities or equations of sound than sounds, have been much more effective in preserving " stereotyped speech" than tlie phonetic alphabets. The reason is this. The symbolic ideas being all monosyllables, and to a certain extent indivisible in sound, always bear a relative value in comparison with other sounds. Hence, though the natural process of decay may lead a Korean to say chop for what a Nanki...Read More