Excerpt from Chinese Art A few words on the writing and pronunciation of Chinese words, addressed to novices in Sinology, may not be out of place here. The Chinese language, it need hardly be said, is monosyllabic, and each word is represented by a separate character in the written script. These characters were originally pictures of natural objects or ideas, used singly or in combination, and it was not until later that they were distinguished into two categories, as phonetics, and determinatives or radicals. The radicals in modern use are 214, a number arbitrarily fined for dictionary purposes, as a means of classifying the or more written characters of the language, and of providing a ready means of coining new combinations. The large majority of characters of the modern script are composed of a radical, which gives a clue to the meaning by indicating the particular class of things or ideas to which the combination of which it forms a part belongs, and a phonetic, which conveys some idea of the sound. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.