CHINESE FOR POLITICIANS

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 92, 12 January 1929, Page 24

CHINESE FOR POLITICIANS

It must have been something of a lock to Mr. A. M. Samuel (the Finani'tl Under-Secretary to the Treasury, ho is now studying Chinese) to find uat, in spite of his Toryism, his first isk was to become intimately aclainted with 214 Radicals (comments eville Davison in the “Daily News”). The “Radicals” is the name given to le primitive symbols from which all le fifty thousand or so of complicated ieroglyphs which compose the Chinese ritten language are built up. They are not in any sense letters, for hina has no alphabet, and the form of character bears no relation to its prohnciation; but they have at least a ear meaning, which is more than can i said for the spoken words. Even sound in Chinese may be said > have at least three meanings — its vn, another precisely the opposite, and third denoting some variety of tea. It could hardly be otherwise where >ur hundred or so vocables have to p duty for a hundred times their numar of meanings. Parliamentary ora>ry in Chinese would be -an interesting rperiment — especially to the Press allery. A Minister who referred to his irty as “shih,” for example, might be jcorded as having called it either an t-my, a lion, or a corpse, according to je politics of the reporter. Nor would there be any opportunity >r the polysyllabic perorations of Disleli. Chinese words are all monozllables. Of course, some means of dlstinguish'g these sounds with many meanings id to be devised. One of the most imirtant is the sounding of them in varyig musical tones. There are nine of lese in Cantonese, the principal speech the South, while Pekingese—the offiil or “Mandarin” dialect —makes shift Ith four.

If you pronounce the word “dead” in the following conversation with its full sense-emphasis you will then reproduce them exactly: “Poor Jones is dead.” “What! Dead!” “Yes. Dead” “Good heavens! Dead I”

But it would be in the writing of political pamphlets that the ardent partisan would find Chinese a really ideal medium. Opponents of the “flapper vote” would write down lovingly the characters in which the symbol meaning “woman” is interwoven with others to mean “treachery” or “deceit.” The ardent feminist would find consolation' in the representation of man as an exact picture of the proverbial “poor forked radish.” Mr. Lloyd George would see a fortunate augury for his land campaign in the character denoting “happiness,” which consists principally of “four acres and a house.” Without departing from the most rigid rule of Parliamentary decorum, an opponent could be called a tortoise, otherwise a, “wang pa” or “break eight,” because the unspeakable creature, according to legend, contrived once to break all the eight rules of good behaviour at one fell swoop. A falling birth-rate is condemned In a single word by the character meaning “good,” which is composed of “woman” and “child” combined, and the windy eloquence of the other side is equally graphically portrayed by the symbol for “words”—an open mouth with vapour proceeding from it Altogether, Chinese as a political ve-hicle-has its'points, though the spectacle of harassed shorthand - writers wrestling with a brush and a slab of solid ink would be pathetic.