Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon].

  • Robert Chambers
Date:
1844
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Vestiges of the natural history of creation / [Anon]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    299/408 page 291
    The fifth family is the Chinese, embracing a * large part of China, and most of the regions of Central and Northern Asia. The leading features of the Chinese language are, its consisting alto- gether of monosyllables, and being destitute of all grammatical forms, except certain arrangements and accentuations, which vary the sense of particu- lar words. It is also deficient in some of the con- sonants most conspicuous in other languages, b, d, r, v, and z; so that this people can scarcely pro- nounce our speech in such a way as to be intelli- gible: for example, the word Christus they call Kuliss-ut-oo-suh. The Chinese, strange to say, though they early attained to a remarkable degree of civilization, and have preceded the Europeans in many of the most important inventions, have a language which resembles that of children, or deaf and dumb people. The sentence of short, simple, unconnected words, in which an infant amongst us attempts to express some of its wants and its ideas —the equally broken and difficult terms which the deaf and dumb express by signs, as the following passage of the Lord’s Prayer :—“ Our Father, heaven in, wish your name respect, wish your soul’s kingdom providence arrive, wish your will do heaven earth equality,” &c.—these are like the o 2
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