Japan and the Japanese

654 APPENDIX.
ation, will understand it, and even read it into English, though if read tc
him by a Frenchman it would be totally unintelligible. This process of
reading Chinese characters into Japanese is greatly facilitated by the fact
that, though completely different in its words from the Chinese, the
Japanese l.ingu.-ige, in general, follows, as is the case with the Mongol and
M mil -1m, and many other tongues of Eastern Asia, the same inverse order
of Construction, placing the attribute before the subject, the adjective before
the substantive, the adverb before the verb, the accessory before the principal,
the modifying expression before the expression modified, &c.
There is, however, a certain difficulty in representing the Japanese lan-
guage by these Chinese characters, because Japanese words have many in-
flections which are unknown in Chinese, and for which the Chinese writing
has no symbol.
The missionary monks who transported from India to China, and from
China to Jap-in, the Buddhist system of religion, carried with them, also,
the Sanscrit language and the Dewanagari or Sanscrit alphabet, and it was
probably to them that the Japanese were indebted, if not for the introduction
of the Chinese writing, at lea.t for the syllabary with which the vernaculir
language is written. This syllabary is limited to forty-seven characters, tl e
precise number of the Sanscrit letters, though the number of syllabic souna?
represented is increased to a hundred and forty-four by the use of three additional
signs, to be presently described.
The syllabic sounds expressed by these forty-seven signs, arranged in perpendicular
columns, according to the Japanese method (except that the
Japanese begin at the right), are twice given below ; first, according to
Klaproth ; second, according to Siebold. The discrepancies will be explained
by the remark of Siebold, that the sound which he indicates by / is, in fact,
a sound between / and r, inclining in some provinces more to the /, in others,
as, for instance, at Jedo, more to r. The same is the case also with the
letters h and/'. The y in Klaproth's column indicates and better represents
to an English eye the same sound with the,/
in Siebold's. The vowel sounds
are those respectively of France and Germany. The ou and u indicate the
same sound as that of our English u. The i represents our English e; the
e our English a in fate ;
i
the a our English a in far.