Again, it is not uncommon to hear people talking of the Chinese language
as if it were a single tongue spoken all over China after a more or less
uniform standard. But the fact is that the colloquial is broken up into
at least eight dialects, each so strongly marked as to constitute eight
languages as different to the ear, one from another, as English, Dutch
and German, or French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. A Shanghai man,
for instance, is unintelligible to a Cantonese, and so on. All officials
are obliged, and all of the better educated merchants and others
endeavour, if only for business purposes, to learn something of the
dialect spoken at the court of Peking; and this is what is popularly
known as "Mandarin." The written language remains the same for the whole
empire; which merely means that ideas set down on paper after a uniform
system are spoken with different sounds, just as the Arabic numerals are
written uniformly in England, France and Germany, but are pronounced in
a totally different manner.

The only difficulty of the spoken language, of no matter what dialect,
lies in the "tones," which simply means the different intonations which
may be given to one and the same sound, thus producing so many entirely
different meanings. But for these tones, the colloquial of China would
be absurdly easy, inasmuch as there is no such thing as grammar, in the
sense of gender, number, case, mood, tense, or any of the variations we
understand by that term. Many amusing examples are current of blunders
committed by faulty speakers, such as that of the student who told his
servant to bring him a goose, when what he really wanted was some salt,
both goose and salt having the same sound, _yen_, but quite different
intonations. The following specimen has the advantage of being true.
A British official reported to the Foreign Office that the people of
Tientsin were in the habit of shouting after foreigners, "Mao-tsu,
mao-tsu" (pronounced _mowdza_, _ow_ as in _how_), from which he gathered