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 words, or ten words to each sound,—still a sufficient hindrance to anything like certain intelligibility of speech. But this is not the whole case. The ten characters, for instance, under each sound, are distributed over four separate groups, formed by certain modulations of the voice, known as Tones, so that actually there would be only an average of 2½ words liable to absolute confusion. Thus 烟 yen^1 means "smoke"; 鹽 yen^2 means "salt"; 眼 yen^3 means "an eye"; and 雁 yen^4 means "a goose." These modulations are not readily distinguished at first; but the ear is easily trained, and it soon becomes difficult to mistake them. Nor is this all. The Chinese, although their language is monosyllabic, do not make an extensive use of monosyllables in speech to express a single thing or idea. They couple their words in pairs. Thus, for "eye" they would say, not _yen_, which strictly means "hole," or "socket," but _yen ching_, the added word _ching_, which means "eyeball," tying down the term to the application required, namely, "eye." In like manner it is not customary to talk about _yen_, "salt," as we do, but to restrict the term as required in each case by the addition of some explanatory word; for instance, 白盐 "white salt," _i.e._ "table salt"; 黑盐 "black salt," _i.e._ "coarse salt"; all of which tends very much to prevent confusion with other words pronounced in the same tone. There are also certain words used as suffixes, which help to separate terms which might otherwise be confused. Thus 裹 _kuo_^3 means "to wrap," and 果 _kuo_^3 means "fruit," the two being identical in sound and tone. And _yao kuo_ might mean either "I want fruit" or "I want to wrap." No one, however, says _kuo_ for "fruit," but _kuo tzŭ_. The suffix _tzŭ_ renders confusion impossible.