The official
name of the region after the Chou infeoffment of 1106 B.C. was the
State of Tsin, and it was roughly divided off to the west from its
less civilized colleague Ts'in by the Yellow River, on the right
bank of which Tsin still possessed a number of towns. It is
particularly difficult for Europeans to realize the sharp
distinction in sound between these two names, the more especially
because we have in the West no conception whatever of the effect
of tone upon a syllable It may be explained, however, that the
sonant initial and even-voiced tone in the one case, contrasted
with the surd initial and the scaled tone in the other, involves
to the Chinese mind a distinction quite as clear in all dialects
as the European distinction in all languages between the two
states of Prussia and Russia, or between the two peoples Swedes
and Swiss: it is entirely the imperfection of our Western
alphabet, not at all that of the spoken sounds or the ideographs,
that is at fault.
The Yellow River, running from north to south, not only roughly
separated from each other these two Tartar-Chinese buffer states
in the north-west, but the same Yellow River, flowing east, and
its tributary, the River Wei, also formed a rough boundary between
the two states of Tsin and Ts'in (together) to the north, and the
innumerable petty but ancient Chinese principalities surrounding
the imperial domain to the south.
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