Though language consists in a system of sounds uttered by the mouth, appealing through the sense of hearing to the mind, yet man has contrived to effect the same purpose through the eye, and hence is enabled to convey to others at a distance his thoughts, his observations, his wishes, and views--to transmit to posterity the results of his labours and researches, or the outpourings of his genius. His plan is to employ certain marks or characters, drawn or impressed on paper, bark, wood, metal, or other materials, which characters shall be understood. These characters, which we call an alphabet, represent sounds; they are made up into words, and as our eye runs along them the varying sounds of the words are suggested, and with them the meaning; this is termed reading, and if we utter the words, reading aloud.
But there are other characters, not alphabetical, which have been, and still are, in use, and which are symbols of ideas, and not of sounds. "While the letters of our alphabet are mere symbols of sounds, the Chinese characters or written words are symbols of ideas, and alike intelligible to the people of Cochin-China, Japan, Loo-choo, and Corea, with those of China itself. As the best practical illustration of a written character, common to several nations who cannot understand each other's speech, Mr. Davis adduces the Arabic numerals, common to all Europe. An Englishman, who could not understand what an Italian meant if he said _venti-due_, could comprehend him immediately if he wrote down _twenty-two_. This advantage, which belongs to our numerals only, pertains to the whole language of the Chinese. The uniformity, however, in the written character, does not prevent the existence of great diversities in the oral languages of the neighbouring countries and China, and even of the separate provinces of the latter country. These diversities are precisely analogous to the different pronunciation given to the same numerical characters in the various countries of Europe.
"To adduce the foregoing example--the number 22, which the Italian calls _venti-due_, a Frenchman pronounces _vingt-deux_, and an Englishman _twenty-two_, though all three write them just alike. It is in this manner that the universality of the Chinese language extends only to the written character, and that the natives of the two extremities of the empire, who read the same books, and understand each other perfectly on paper, are all but mutually unintelligible in speech. The roots, or original characters of the Chinese, are only two hundred and fourteen in number, and might, indeed, be reduced to a much smaller amount by a little dissection and analysis. These are combined with each other to form other words, or express other ideas, very much in the same way that the individual Arabic numerals are combined to express the infinite varieties of numbers. By a species of analogy, they may be called the alphabet of the language, with the difference that exists between an alphabet of ideas, and an alphabet of sounds."[17]