A few instances will place the normal progress of language from stratum to stratum more clearly before our eyes. We have seen that in Chinese every word is monosyllabic, every word tells, and there are, as yet, no suffixes by which one word is derived from another, no case-terminations by which the relation of one word to another could be indicated. How, then, does Chinese distinguish between the son of the father, and the father of the son? Simply by position. _Fú_ is father, _tzé_, son; therefore _fú tzé_ is son of the father, _tzé fú_, father of the son. This rule admits of no exception but one. If a Chinese wants to say _a wine-glass_, he puts _wine_ first and _glass_ last, as in English. If he wants to say _a glass of wine_, he puts _glass_ first and _wine_ last. Thus _i-pei thsieou_, a cup of wine; _thsieou pei_, a wine-cup. If, however, it seems desirable to mark the word which is in the genitive more distinctly, the word _tchi_ may be placed after it, and we may say, _fú tchi tzé_, the son of the father. In the Mandarin dialect this _tchi_ has become _ti_, and is added so constantly to the governed word, that, to all intents and purposes, it may be treated as what we call the termination of the genitive. Originally this _tchi_ was a relative, or rather a demonstrative, pronoun, and it continues to be used as such in the ancient Chinese.[10] It is perfectly true that Chinese possesses no derivative suffixes; that it cannot derive, for instance, _kingly_ from a noun, such as _king_, or adjectives like _visible_ and _invisible_ from a verb _videre_, to see. Yet the same idea which we express by invisible, is expressed without difficulty in Chinese, only in a different way. They say _khan-pu-kien_, “I-behold-and-do-not-see,” and this to them conveys the same idea as the English _invisible_, though more exactly _invisible_ might be rendered by _kien_, to see, _pou-te_, one cannot, _tí_, which. We cannot in Chinese derive from _ferrum_, iron, a new substantive _ferrarius_, a man who works in iron, a blacksmith; _ferraria_, an iron mine, and again _ferrariarius_, a man who works in an iron mine. All this is possible in an inflectional language only. But it is not to be supposed that in Chinese there is an independent expression for every single conception, even for those which are clearly secondary and derivative. If an arrow in Chinese is _shi_, then a maker of arrows (in old French _fléchier_, in English _fletcher_) is called an arrow-man, _shi-jin_. _Shui_ means water, _fu_, man; hence _shui-fu_, a water man, a water carrier. The same word _shui_, water, if followed by _sheu_, hand, stands for steersman, literally, water-hand. _Kin_ means gold, _tsiang_, maker; hence _kin-tsiang_, a goldsmith. _Shou_ means writing, _sheu_, hand; hence _shou-sheu_, a writer, a copyist, literally, a writing-hand.