things or ideas, all expressed in speech, for instance, by the one
single sound _I_.

The confusion likely to arise from such conditions needs not to be
enlarged upon; it is at once obvious, and probably gave rise to the
following sapient remark by a globe-trotting author, which I took from
a newspaper in England:—

"In China, the letter _I_ has one hundred and forty-five different ways
of being pronounced, and each pronunciation has a different meaning."

It would be difficult to squeeze more misleading nonsense into a smaller
compass. Imagine the agonies of a Chinese infant school, struggling
with the letter _I_ pronounced in 145 different ways, with a different
meaning to each! It will suffice to say, what everybody here present
must know, that Chinese is not in any sense an alphabetic language, and
that consequently there can be no such thing as "the letter _I_."

When closely examined, this great difficulty of many words with but one
common sound melts rapidly away, until there is but a fairly small
residuum with which the student has to contend. The same difficulty
confronts us, to a slighter extent, even in English. If I say, "I met a
bore in Broadway," I may mean one of several things. I may mean a tidal
wave, which is at once put out of court by the logic of circumstances.
Or I may mean a wild animal, which also has circumstances against it.

To return to Chinese. In the first place, although there are no doubt
42,000 separate written characters in the Chinese language, about
one-tenth of that number, 4200, would more than suffice for the needs of
an average speaker. Adopting this scale, we have 420 sounds and 4200