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Book Description:
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1854 Excerpt: ...it can be made available for practical purposes. If then we exclude all national and exclusive systems of spelling, and retain as much as possible the three general principles, of expressing a simple sound by a simple letter, a compound sound by a compound letter, and the same sound by the same letter,--if besides we bear in mind that none but Latin letters are to be admitted into the Universal alphabet, it will be seen that there remain only two ways in which our problem can be solved. We must first of all find out certain physiological analogies which exist between those sounds for which the Latin alphabet supplies simple letters, and others for which it does not. Thus we should find that there is analogy between the Unguals and the Dentals, between the Palatals and the Gutturals, between different nasals, such as n, ng, ny, and between different sibilants, such as s in please and pleasure. If then we retained t and d, as we naturally should, for the usual dental sounds, expressed by these letters in Latin, we might use the same, with some diacritical marks, to express the lingual sound of t and d, wherever it occurs in a foreign tongue. Again, as we know that the palatal sound of ch and j, arises most frequently from an original guttural, we should naturally use k and g, with 'a diacritical mark, to express these modified sounds which in English are usually expressed by ch and j, in Italian by ci and gi, in German by tsch and dsch. In the same manner we should retain the general base of n, where we had to express the guttural n as in-cur, the palatal n as in inch, or the lingual n as in some Indian dialects. After the analogies of certain classes of letters have been established,--and this has in fact been done by the physiological explanation of the alp...