The Language of Concise Chinese Grammar by Isaiah

Abstract

This paper introduces Concise Chinese Grammar, a book on Chinese grammar written by Isaiah, a missionary of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Beijing, and discusses the Chinese language as reflected in it. The most significant features of this book are the author’s explanations of Chinese grammar, the Cyrillic transcriptions and accent markings of Chinese characters. The paper analyses the book’s lexical and grammatical characteristics and states that features of the late Qing Beijing dialect can be found in the book. It then organizes the system of stress markings and makes an attempt to explore their general trends.