Excerpt from Colloquial Chinese (Northern) There has been current for a long time past a widespread belief that Chinese stands in the same relation to Japanese as does English to French or English to German. No doubt this idea was born and fostered by the propinquity of the two far-eastern nations. Radically, however, the two languages are as far apart as the Poles. Japanese came from the South, a language colloquially expressive and with a strongly developed agglutinative tendency, but innocent of any script. The Chinese, however, had not only an artistic system of writing, but also a comprehensive litera ture. The newly-arrived tenants of the Land of the Rising Sun immediately borrowed the ideographic scheme of their Western neighbours and began the laborious task of fitting it to their own polysyllabic Speech. Thus arose one of the most peculiar of popular delusions for Chinese is essentially monosyllabic. By the invention and frequent use of written equivalents of the colloquial particles, however, the Japanese overcame what must have seemed at first a supreme difficulty. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.