A NEW ALPHABET

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXVIII, Issue 8090, 7 January 1903, Page 4

A NEW ALPHABET

The "Sunday at Home" tells an interesting story of- the Rev. W,. Hill-Murray's work at Pekin, which a critic refers to as "a perfect romance of The son of aGlasgow working man, Mr Murray, having lost his left arm in a mill accident, served his mission apprenticeship among foreign sailors on the Clyde. His success here led to his being sent to North China, where he learned the language, and sold the Chinese Scriptures. A blind man came to him one day and asked for a Bible, that others might read it to him. Mr Murray had felt much for the many blind Chinamen about him, and" wondered if some adaptation of tne BraiUe type could be introduced; but the want of a simple alphabet hampered him. At last he hit upon the device of writing down the 408 sounds of the language as spoken at Pekin, -with a numeral under each sound. He used dots to represent the numerals that corresponds to the sounds, and so invented for the blind a veritable Chinese alphabet. It was much easier for the blind Chinaman to learn to read than for the 'Chinamen who were not blind. On several of the poor asking Mr Murray to provide them with an I easy system of learning to read, it flashed on him that he could connect the white dots by straight black lines. By so doing, "he produced a-series of lines, angles, and ! squares, forming the simplest set of symbols ever devised for use in any country." He got the types cast at last, after infinite trouble, and tried his new alphabet on some of the oldest and dullest of his seeing converts. (He gave them 2£d a day to induce them to learn to read, and at the end of six weeks they could both read and write,; Chinamen ordinarily taking six years to read the ideograph. So the crippled Glasgow boy became the inventor of the numeral Type for China. Of course, the ordinary missionary work had been in no way negkcttd. and Mr Murray, after the expenditure of much time and labor ai'd money, had erected very convenient buildings. Those were burned down by the Boxers, and most- of the blind inmates of the school were massacred, and 'Mr Murray himself went- through the siege of the Legations. The Chinese" Government has since replaced the ruined mission house, but the devoted missionary has recently been invalided home. •