Background
Joshua Marshman was born on April 20, 1768, at Westbury Leigh, Wiltshire, England.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
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(Chinese, in its various forms, is spoken today by over a ...)
Chinese, in its various forms, is spoken today by over a billion people, making it the most spoken language in the world. A member of the Sino-Tibetan family, it is a tone language with an analytic structure. First published in 1814, this grammar of colloquial Chinese was compiled by the Christian missionary Joshua Marshman (1768-1837), who was inspired to do so after preparing a Chinese translation of the Bible. It begins with a preliminary essay outlining the characters of Chinese, its tones, its system of monosyllables and its relationship to neighbouring languages. The grammar itself is extensive, covering all aspects of the language's structure, including case, agreement, pronouns, verbs, mood, tense, prosody, parts of speech and dialect variation. Illustrated with numerous examples and explaining each grammatical concept in detail, this work remains useful and relevant in historical linguistics.
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Joshua Marshman was born on April 20, 1768, at Westbury Leigh, Wiltshire, England.
In childhood, poverty hampered his formal education but his deep thirst for knowledge imbued him in desultory reading and it is said that he read than five hundred volumes before he was eighteen. He moved to Bristol Academy and learnt in Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac.
In June 1794, he was Baptised and was soon appointed master of the charity school attached to the Baptist Chapel in Broadmead, Bristol. Here he exhibited his deep interest in Biblical learning. He translated from the Latin and transcribed the substance of Arabic grammar. Through the periodical accounts of the Baptist Missionary Society he came to know about william carey’s work in India and volunteered to join him. He along with some of his fellows set out from Portsmouth for India and reached serampore on October 13, 1799, to join William Carey.
Within a very short time Marshman opened a boarding school at which the children of most of the Europeans were taught. By one year he made astonishing progress in learning Bengali and Sanskrit Language. Then he engaged himself in translating Indian classical literature into English and Bible into Indian language. Marshman along with William Carey published the English version of the Ramayana of Valmeeki from Serampore press in 1806, and its second volume in 1808. Here he studied the Chinese language and later translated the scriptural extracts into Chinese and compiled a Chinese grammar. He published A Dissertation on the Character and Sounds of the Chinese Language (1809), a translation of teachings of Confucious (1809) and Clavis Sinica (1814).
In a prospectus written by Joshua Marshman and issued by William Carey, Joshua Marshman and William Ward proposed a college for the instruction of Asiatic, Christian and other youth of Eastern Literature and European Science. To meet the demand serampore college was established on July 5, 1818. But the shortage of fund hampered its academic programmme. To solve the problem Marshman went back to England in 1826 and then visited Denmark. He succeeded to manage a Charter of Incorporation from the Danish king Frederick VI to the Serampore College. In May 1829 he returned to India and with the help of the Royal grant he along with his associate William Carey made the mission in operation.
Joshua Marshman died on December 6, 1837.
(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
(Chinese, in its various forms, is spoken today by over a ...)
In 1791, Joshua Marshman married Hannah Marshman (née Shepherd), the couple had 12 children.