嬭花, borrowed to represent the word na-hwun, infant, mean respectively liking or sucking milk, and milk-flower, and not infant; they are therefore discarded, and the veng-li characters 嬰孩 (ing-æ) which means infant are used. it is hoped that this plan of writing characters will make the book more generally useful than it otherwise would have been, and that it may also prove a help to Chinese students wishing to learn English.
In a few cases where no veng-li equivalents could be found, Mandarin expressions are used.
Sometimes the colloquial phrase expresses a peculiar, and purely local shade of meaning, in such cases the approximate meaning has been given as nearly as possible in the veng-li, or the characters have been omitted.
Instances will no doubt occur, where characters will suggest themselves to the student, which, at first sight, seem to be more appropriate than those used. These however may be just the instances in which the characters have been changed over and over again, and those finally adopted have been the result of repeated examinations. A very simple example is the word siao-nying, meaning child in the colloquial. it would seem self-evident that 小人 would be appropriate the appropriate characters, but in the veng-li these signify a bad or mean man: the characters 小孩 (siao-æ) are therefore substituted.
As a Ningpo teacher might not always know whether certain expressions would be current elsewhere, an experienced Shanghai teacher was employed, who read over the work and in the presence of, and with the approval of the Ningpo teacher, altered such words and sentences as were unintelligible to him.
The late revisions have produced more changes than were anticipated when the system of attaching small circles to the characters was first adapted, and they might perhaps as well have been omitted; but they are allowed to remain, as they may aid the memory of the retaining characters.
