My dear good old friend,
I am much obliged to you for communicating to me the interesting letter of your learned correspondent Mr. Schwartz which I have read with great pleasure, and not without improvement. I am sorry however to find that that gentleman and I differ on the subject of the Chinese system of writing. I am not astonished at it, for I know the difficulty of getting rid of long preconceived ideas, particularly when they have long been current among the learned world. But I have not yet been convinced that I am in the wrong, and though I have many opponents, I still say with Galileo, E pur si muove.
Your correspondent observes that the subject of the nature of the Chinese characters has been fully discussed. We poor Americans have been often reproached, and often with reason, with not having read every thing which had been published in Europe on the subject of which we treat; but I doubt its being so in the present case. I believe that nobody before me ever asserted and attempted to prove that the Chinese characters are lexigraphic and not ideographic. Should it be otherwise, I would be very glad to know who are the authors that have written upon this subject. I believe it will be difficult to point them out. If your correspondent can do it, I shall be much obliged to him for that favour.
My system it is true has not been very successful in Europe. In England I have been very severely treated, in books, in reviews, and in literary journals. In France the Sinologists have kept a profound silence. Several have promised to review my work but none of them have yet done it. I know however by their writings that they persevere in their old opinions, or at least appear to do so. So much for Europe. In China however I have met with better success. I am informed that my work has been favourably reviewed in the Chinese Repository printed at Canton, and there largely extracted from. Several eminent missionaries well skilled practically as well as theoretically in the Chinese language have expressed their concurrence on my opinion. But my Chinese success has not stopped here.
The principal argument of the supporters of ideography has been the long supposed fact that the Chinese characters serve as a common medium of communication to the Chinese, Japanese, Cochin-Chinese, and numerous other nations in that quarter of the world. But that pretended fact is now fully disproved. The Revd. Mr. Medhurst, an eminent English Missionary has informed us in his lately published work upon China, that the Japanese have Chinese books with interlineal translations in their own language and character without which they could not understand them. But that is not all. The right Revd. Mr. Taberd, bishop of Isauropolis, and vicar general in Cochin China where he resided many years, has lately published a Cochin-Chinese and Latin, and Latin and Cochin-Chinese dictionary in two thick quarto volumes. In the preface to which he expressly says that the Cochin-Chinese and Chinese do not understand each other either in speaking or in writing. His words are these: "Neque legendo, neque loquendo, se invicem intelligunt." Now it is to be observed that the Cochin-Chinese language is monosyllabic like the Chinese, and its structure is on the same model and what is still stronger it is written with the Chinese characters, but then the characters although similar in form do not agree in sense, for instance the character which in one language means father in the other means to be angry, etc.
Besides these frequent discrepancies there are many others which make the writings of those two nations unintelligible to each other. The Japanese language is entirely different from the Chinese. It is Polysyllabic and has grammatical forms, and it has a syllabic alphabet of its own. The secret of all this, and what makes those nations understand each other in writing is that they learn the Chinese in their schools as we learn the Latin in our own, at least the better sort do so as we are informed by the Bishop above mentioned. They pronounce it however differently, as the European Nations do the Latin, which is chiefly owing to a difference in their organs which cannot pronounce certain letters, and then not using the Chinese as vernacular, they have not the habit of speaking it, and their memory is more fixed upon the signs than upon the words.
These facts have been but lately brought to light and I think that they confirm fully my hypothesis for if the Chinese characters were ideographic, all those nations would understand them alike, and particularly the Cochin-Chinese would not apply them to words of a different meaning. And there is a curious fact in the Cochin-Chinese, it is, that they apply the same sign to words having the same sound with the Chinese word to which it belongs, but a quite different sense, which shows that those characters are considered by them more as representative of sound than of meaning.
As to the origin of the characters it has little to do with the question. We must consider them as they are now. I believe with Mr. Schwartz that in the beginning the Chinese tried to recall their words to their memory by the pictorial representation of the objects which they were meant to express; for instance they will have made a circle to recall the word sun and a crescent for the word moon but that could not go very far, as no language is entirely composed of visible objects and for all other words (except a few metaphors not necessarily intelligible) they must have made use of arbitrary signs as they do now. The arrangement of the characters to represent words which a single character does not express, is very ingenious, and may be called to a certain degree ideographic, but its object is still to recall the words to the memory by the manner in which the characters are combined, which I have fully explained in my book.
I have thought my dear sir that your correspondent's objection required an answer from me to show the high respect which I entertain for him. You are at liberty to communicate this letter to him if you shall think proper.
I remain your sincere friend,
Peter S. Du Ponceau
PS. To show how attached the French sinologists are to their old system and how ingenious they are in supporting it, one of them Mr. Bazin in a review of the Cochin-Chinese dictionary above mentioned in the Journal Asiatique for February of the present year translates the Latin words of Bishop Taberd above quoted by "ne s'entendre quere mieux par ecrit que verbalement," which implies that the Chinese, and Cochin-Chinese understand each other in writing to a certain extent.
I hope this is not a wilful alteration of the text, which the writer does not cite in the original Latin, it looks however very suspicious. In that review the writer makes no mention of my work, which is very pardonable, but what is hardly so, is his saying that there is in Chinese a written language which has never been spoken, that is to say a language which cannot be read aloud. So much for the strange conceptions to whkh deep rooted prejudices will lead a man of real knowledge, as Mr. Bazin certainly is.
This is a letter written by Peter D. Du Ponceau to John Vaughan in 1841 regarding the Chinese writing.
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