[Mendoza already said: “It is an admirable thing to consider how that in that kingdome they doo speake manie languages, the one differing from the other: yet generallie in writing they doo understand one the other, and in speaking not.” (_Parke’s Transl._ p. 93.)] Professor Kidd, speaking of his instructors in the Mandarin and Fo-kien dialects respectively, says: “The teachers in both cases read the same books, composed in the same style, and attached precisely the same ideas to the written symbols, but could not understand each other in conversation.” Moreover, besides these sounds attaching to the Chinese characters when read in the dialect of Fo-kien, thus discrepant from the sounds used in reading the same characters in the Mandarin dialect, yet _another_ class of sounds is used to express the same ideas in the Fo-kien dialect when it is used colloquially and without reference to written symbols! (_Kidd’s China_, etc., pp. 21–23.) The term _Fokien dialect_ in the preceding passage is ambiguous, as will be seen from the following remarks, which have been derived from the Preface and Appendices to the Rev. Dr. Douglas’s Dictionary of the Spoken Language of Amoy,[6] and which throw a distinct light on the subject of this note:— “The vernacular or spoken language of Amoy is not a mere colloquial dialect or _patois_, it is a _distinct language_—one of the many and widely differing spoken languages which divide among them the soil of China. For these spoken languages are not _dialects_ of one language, but cognate languages, bearing to each other a relation similar to that between Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, or between English, Dutch, German, and Danish. The so-called ‘_written language_’ is indeed uniform throughout the whole country, but that is rather a _notation_ than a language. And this written language, as read aloud from books, is not _spoken_ in any place whatever, under any form of pronunciation. The most learned men never employ it as a means of ordinary oral communication even among themselves. It is, in fact, a _dead language_, related to the various spoken languages of China, somewhat as Latin is to the languages of Southern Europe.