In this "pidgin" English he can express himself as in Chinese by merely
changing the positions of the words:—

"He wantchee my." "My wantchee he."

"My belong Englishman."

"That knife belong my."

Some years back, when I was leaving China for England with young
children, their faithful Chinese nurse kept on repeating to the little
ones the following remarkable sentence, "My too muchey solly you go
steamah; you no solly my."

All this is very absurd, no doubt; still it is _bona fide_ Chinese,
and illustrates very forcibly how an intelligible language may be
constructed of root-ideas arranged in logical sequence.

If the last word had now been said in reference to colloquial, it would
be as easy for us to learn to speak Chinese as it is for a Chinaman to
learn to speak Pidgin-English. There is, however, a great obstacle still
in the way of the student. The Chinese language is peculiarly lacking
in vocables; that is to say, it possesses very few sounds for the
conveyance of speech. The dialect of Peking is restricted to four
hundred and twenty, and as every word in the language must fall under
one or other of those sounds, it follows that if there are 42,000 words
in the language (and the standard dictionary contains 44,000), there
is an average of 100 words to each sound. Of course, if any sound
had less than 100 words attached to it, some other sound would have
proportionately more. Thus, accepting the average, we should have 100