The Chinese Language
By Eugene Ching
Part III
THE CHINESE language is known as an isolating or analytical language chiefly because of its lack of inflection. In English, for example, the word "admire" has at least 8 forms: admire, admires, admired, admiration, admiring, admirable, admirably, admiringly. The verb of some highly inflected languages such as Latin may have different endings for all persons, tenses, numbers, and moods. Chinese uses the same form for all. Compare the following sentences:
Wo chin-t'ien ch'ih Chung-kuo fan le. (Today I ate a Chinese meal.) (past tense)
T，a t'ien-t'ien ch'ih Chung-kuo fan. (He eats a Chinese meal every day) (present tense, third person, singular)
Wo ming-t'ien ch，ih Chung-kuo fan. (Tomorrow I shall eat a Chinese meal.) (future tense)
Fan ch'ih wan le (The food has been eaten) (passive voice)
Sh'ih-t'ou neng ch'ih tuo hao a! (It would be wonderful if stone could be eaten!) (subjunctive mood)
Wo t'i-yi t'a ch'ih ssu-tun fan. (I suggest that he eat four meals) (suggestion)
We find from the above that in Chinese only one form of the verb ch'ih has been used, while the English equivalent eat appears in a variety of forms.
The lack of inflection can be seen even more clearly with the Chinese pronouns. English has 19 different forms: I, me, my, mine; you, yours; he, him, his; she, her, hers; it, its; they, them, their, theirs ； who, whom, whose. Chinese has only five (wo, ni， t'a, tsa, shei) with a plural suffix "-men" and a possessive suffix "-te). It is true that in written Chinese, attempts have been made to distinguish some of the pronouns, especially the third person.. Five different forms are currently used for "t，a'，： the inanimate, the animal, the male human,
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CHINATOWN NEWS, NOV. 3, 1964
