And, having so very few noises to work with, the Han must sound them on different tones-high, mid, low, rising, falling-to make a sufficient variety for compiling a vocabulary. My name in their speech was always Mah-ko. The sound of r, for one, is quite beyond them. Evidently the Han throat is incapable of forming more than a very few of the sounds that other people make. The Han, by contrast, is a speech of staccato syllables, and they are sung rather than spoken. The Mongol speech is gruff and harsh, like its speakers, but it at least employs sounds not too different from those heard in our Western languages. While I had no trouble learning to speak Mongol, and to write with its alphabet, I never learned more than a rudimentary comprehension of Han. “The Han language resembles no other on this earth.
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