Transactions of the second session held at London, in September, 1874 / edited by R.K. Douglas.
- International Congress of Orientalists
- Date:
- 1876
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Transactions of the second session held at London, in September, 1874 / edited by R.K. Douglas. Source: Wellcome Collection.
113/514 (page 103)
![b.c. 200; and tliat time or its middle point, b.c. 650, may be taken as a convenient way-mark for testing the progress of development. The writers of that age were in possession of what is called the ]£u wen as their medium for expressing their ideas in a written form. That this was not identical with the colloquial language of the day may be argued from the fact that the founder of the Wen chang or modern literary style, and the founder of modern poetry, both lived within that period. Tso kieu ming, whose amplification of the Ch'un ts'ieu of Confucius has been recently translated by Dr. Legge, is greatly admired as a master of style. His hook is used as a guide- book in the art of sentence-making, in the effective use of particles, in judiciousness of grouping, and in a vivid and pictorial arrangement of facts in a narrative. But in attaining this excellence it is manifest that he was lefining upon the popular language, and helping to found a new style. He must be regarded, then, as an epoch-maker in the development of the book language. Under him it began to diverge more widely than before from the colloquial style. In proof of the existence of dialects in the time of Tso kieu ming, reference may here be made to some dialectic words which have been pointed out by Legge. In proof that the hook language was once colloquial, it is sufficient to refer to the more popular of the Odes. They must have been in the language of the common people. The poet whose appearance helps to mark a great turning-point in the development of the literary language was C‘hu yuen in the third century b.c. Under his hands the ancient poetry, which was thoroughly colloquial, became more cultured. Instead of being the simple outflow of feeling, put into words bearing a rhythmical form but colloquial, poetry became distinguished for a specially ornate phraseology. The poems which Confucius collected were vernacular, or chiefly so, and differ in this respect from those of C‘hu yuen. The existence of the Er ya and other dictionaries of archaisms published in the Cheu and Han dynasties, is of itself a proof of the fact that Confucius looked hack on a lengthened time of literary antiquity preceding his own. It had then become necessary to ex- plain old words. Obsolete names were constantly increasing in number. The language was stereotyped in its characters, hut the living words which those characters represented were constantly](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b2935187x_0113.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
