Modern Chinese, which has changed but little from the ancient tongue and is the least developed of all existing languages, is monosyllabic; i. e. each syllable conveys a complete idea, all its words are expressed by single separate sounds. Of these elements, or _roots_, it contains 450; changes of emphasis and intonation, accompanied with corresponding changes in meaning, increase this number to 1,263. Chinese may be called a language without grammar, as it dispenses with inflection and conjugation, and leaves the relations of words and their functions as different parts of speech to be determined by the arrangement. Thus _sin_ means _honor_, _honorable_, _honorably_, or _to be honorable_, according to its position in the sentence. Plurality and gender are generally indicated by adding roots with a modifying signification. Son in Chinese is _man-child_; daughter, _woman-child_; a mare is called a _mother-horse_; people is the word _surnames_ with _a hundred_ prefixed. This grouping together of roots is carried to great lengths. Writing materials is expressed by two words denoting _four precious objects_ (paper, brush, ink, and palette); a trader is _a buying-selling-man_; a knife is a _sword’s-son_; while difference of opinion is expressed by four words meaning _I east, thou west_. =Characters used in Writing.=—The written characters of the Chinese were originally outline pictures of visible objects; specimens are presented below. A crescent (1) stood for the moon; three peaks (2), for a mountain; (3) is a tortoise, (4) a fish, (5) a field. Pictographs were frequently combined to represent a single idea. The notion of song, for instance, was conveyed by a mouth and a bird (6); that of tears, by the symbols for eye and water; beauty and goodness, by the representation of a virgin and an infant. [Illustration: Pictographs as above] One or more of these hieroglyphic symbols (_determinatives_) enter into the composition of every modern Chinese character—which has also a phonetic element, like the characters of the Egyptian (p. 120) and Assyrian (p. 106) systems. The ideographic element is indispensable: the one sound _tschoo_, for example, means ape, whirlpool, island, silk, deep, a wine, a kind of plant, to enclose, to help, to quarrel, to walk, to answer. It would be next to impossible to interpret the written symbol correctly, were not a separate ideogram adopted for each idea. This necessary device, however, involved the wholesale multiplication of characters. Over 40,000 are contained in the fullest dictionaries; but three-fourths of this number are almost wholly unknown, and only about 5,000 are in common use.