Publisher's Synopsis
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.
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