"People love him (or her)," we should have— 人爱他 _jen ai t'a_, in which once more the noticeable feature is that the middle character, although passing from the singular to the plural number, suffers no change of any kind whatever. Further, the character for "man" is in the plural simply because such a rendering is the only one which the genius of the Chinese language will here tolerate, helped out by the fact that the word by itself does not mean "_a_ man," but rather what we may call the root-idea of humanity. Such terms as "a man," or "six men," or "some men," or "many men," would be expressed each in its own particular way. "All men," for instance, would involve merely the duplication of the character _jen_:— 人人爱他 _jen jen ai t'a_. It is the same with tenses in Chinese. They are not brought out by inflection, but by the use of additional words. 来 _lai_ is the root-idea of "coming," and lends itself as follows to the exigencies of conjugation:— Standing alone, it is imperative:— 来 _Lai!_ = "come!" "here!" 我来 _wo lai_ = "I come, _or_ am coming." 他来 _t'a lai_ = "he comes, _or_ is coming." And by inserting 不 _pu_, a root-idea of negation,— 他不来 _t'a pu lai_ = "he comes not, _or_ is not coming." To express an interrogative, we say,— 他来不来 _t'a lai pu lai_ = "he come no come?" _i.e._ "is he coming?" submitting the two alternatives for the person addressed to choose from in reply. The indefinite past tense is formed by adding the word 了 _liao_ or _lo_ "finished":— 他来了 _t'a lai lo_ = "he come finish," = "he has come." This may be turned into the definite past tense by inserting some indication of time; _e.g._ 他早上来了 = "he came this morning." Here we see that the same words may be indefinite or definite according to circumstances. It is perhaps more startling to find that the same words may be both active and passive. Thus, 丢 _tiu_ is the root-idea of "loss," "to lose," and 了 puts it into the past tense. Now 我丢了 means, and can only mean, "I have lost"—something understood, or to be expressed. Strike out 我 and substitute 書 "a book." No Chinaman would think that the new sentence meant "The book has lost"—something understood, or to be expressed, as for instance its cover; but he would grasp at once the real sense, "The book is or has been lost." In the case of such, a phrase as "The book has lost" its cover, quite a different word would be used for "lost." We have the same phenomenon in English. In the _New York Times_ of February 13, I read, "Mr. So-and-so dined," meaning not that Mr. So-and-so took his dinner, but had been entertained at dinner by a party of friends,—a neuter verb transformed into a passive verb by the logic of circumstances. By a like process the word 死 _ssŭ_ "to die" may also mean "to make to die" = "to kill."