The Discovery of Genesis (8 page)

In summary, we find that
the written language of China was conceived during the primeval, monotheistic period
, when the religious concepts were still pristine and the history of earlier ages unmuddied by later innovations. This ancient pictographic and ideographic language has survived unscathed, and we believe bears a witness to the original beliefs of the Chinese, handed down by oral tradition. The record contained by many specific characters carries such a close similarity to the Hebrew Genesis that it would seem only logical to believe that both civilizations must have access to the same common historical knowledge. Acquaintance with the true early religious background of the Chinese therefore makes Genesis correlation more credible and understandable.

Chapter 3: Easy Lessons in “Character Building”

The Occidental is rightly awed when looking at the written Chinese language. Whereas the Western alphabet has a mere 26 letters from which to make thousands of combinations forming words, long and short, ordinary or exotic, colloquial or erudite, the Chinese language has a far more complex and intriguing system.

For our purpose, we will study the written language quite superficially and quickly find how it builds on itself. Be assured that the ordinary careful reader will not find this baffling or too difficult to comprehend. However, it is necessary to have a basic introduction to the Chinese characters which will be not only informative but also interesting.

All ancient script began with simple line drawings of familiar objects. Word picture systems were developed by many civilizations including the early Sumerian people in the Mesopotamian Valley, the Egyptians, and the Chinese. In the evolution of most scripts, ideograms emerged at the demand for more abstract ideas of size, movement, thought, and feeling, a feature of the Chinese language that will be demonstrated in this chapter. Since the pictographs and ideographs had corresponding sounds of the spoken language, they were also phonetic. The more cumbersome drawings of most early languages were abbreviated into shortened forms for the sake of rapid writing until letters evolved and phonetic alphabets were born. This latter simplified writing, however, never developed in the Chinese language.

Only in the past few decades have actual changes been fostered in Chinese writing in an attempt to simplify the characters and make reading and writing easier. These modifications completely destroy the pictographic aspects of the language. Therefore in the near future the classical Chinese characters may be as dead as ancient Latin or Greek. Instead of being the written language of the greatest number of people on the face of the earth today this venerable writing may fall into disuse and be known and studied only by scholars.

Whereas most written languages construct words from the letters of an alphabet, the Chinese written language uses
radicals
, also called
keys, roots
or
primitives
, as the basic units and building blocks for the word characters. Each character contains one or more
root
symbols. The
radicals
, of which there are 214, are in turn organized according to the number of strokes required in writing them, anywhere from one to 17. Numbered in definite order
¹
, from the simplest to the most complex, these
keys
must be memorized in proper sequence by the scholar so that they may be recited easily.

The
radicals
are the most
primitive
(hence this synonym) form of the language and many are clearly pictographs, or word pictures; for example,
a cliff of precipice
obviously is an embankment;
a roof or house
demonstrates a gable in the center with eaves at the edges;
streams, to flow
or
, show torrents or eddies of moving water;
claws of birds or animals, to scratch or grasp
, depicts digits spread apart in such a way that the extremity is poised for action.

As this book is read, one will become fascinated at the ingenuity demonstrated in the language. Because the objects represented are so graphic, many of the radicals are easy to remember.
Field, landed property, garden
looks, like a well-marked-out and irrigated plot of land.
A tree, wood or wooden
, shows not only the tree (the vertical line above the horizontal line of the ground), but also branching roots.
Mouth, speech, talk
is in fact a gaping orifice and can represent not only the oral cavity but also the activities of the mouth such as eating, speaking, or breathing. Just as in English one uses the expression “so many mouths to feed” in reference to the number of individuals indicated, so
can also represent a person.