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Art. X.—Principles of Composition in Chinese as deduced from the Written Characters

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Legge
Legge
Affiliation:
Professor of Chinese at Oxford
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Extract

It has often been said that there is no Grammar in Chinese; and the statement is true. When we speak of “grammar,” with reference to the written characters, or even to the spoken language, of the people of China, the term must be understood in a peculiar sense. Grammar, as the Greek derivation shows, has to do with words, and is applicable only to languages that have an alphabet; whereas the Chinese written characters were at first pictures and ideagrams, and they have continued to be so substantially during all the millenniums of their use, down to the present day.

Type
Original Communications
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , April 1879 , pp. 238 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1879

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References

page 240 note 1 See the Dictionnaire des Antiquités Grecques et Romaines, d'après les Textes et les Monuments; under the direction of MM. Ch. Daremberg et Edm. Saglio, Article Alphabetum.

page 242 note 1 Introduction to the Study of the Chinese Characters, p. 42.

page 243 note 1 The Shih, II. iv. ode 2.

page 244 note 1 Analects, VI. i.

page 245 note 1 The title of Pîs work is See some account of it in Edkins's Grammar of the Shang-hai Dialect, pp. 62, 63, et al.

page 245 note 2 Premare's Notitia Linguæ Sinicæ, p. 47; Rémusat's Elemens de la Grammaire Chinoise, p. 35.

page 250 note 1 Grammaire, p. 36.

page 256 note 1 The reader will understand that the Chinese read down from top to bottom of the column, beginning on the right. The extract from the Confucian Analects, however, is made to conform to our English method of printing.

page 271 note 1 See the “Syllabic Dictionary of the Chinese Language,” Introduction, p. 27.