Chinese-English Dictionary of the Vernacular or Spoken Language of Amoy e-bog

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The vernacular or spoken language of Amoy, which this Dictionary attempts to make more accessible than formerly, has been also termed by some The Amoy Dialect or The Amoy Colloquial; and it partially coincides with the so-called Hok-kien Dialect, illustrated by the Rev. Dr. Medhurst in his quarto Dictionary under that title. But such words as Dialect or Colloquial give an erroneous conception of its nature. It is not a mere colloquial dialect or patois; it is spoken by the highest ranks just as by the common people, by the most learned just as by the ignorant; learned men indeed add a few polite or pedantic phrases, but these are mere excrescences (and even they are pronounced according to the Amoy sounds), while the main body and staple of the spoken language of the most refined and learned classes is the same as that of coolies, labourers, and boatmen.<br><br>Nor does the term dialect convey anything like a correct idea of its distinctive character; it is no mere dialectic variety of some other language; it is a distinct language, one of the many and widely differing languages which divide among them the soil of China.<br><br>The so-called written language of China is indeed uniform throughout the whole country; but it is rather a notation than a language; for this universal written language is pronounced differently when read aloud in the different parts of China, so that while as written it is one, as soon as it is pronounced it splits into several languages. And still further, this written language, as it is read aloud from books, is not spoken in any place whatever under any form of pronunciation. The most learned men never employ it as a means of ordinary oral communication even among themselves. It is in fact a dead language, related to the various spoken languages of China somewhat as Latin is to the languages of South-western Europe.<br><br&