Page:A dictionary of the plant names of the Philippine Islands (1903).djvu/18

10 etc., the letters in the various words have the same values as in the Spanish language.

The only Philippine author who has used any other method of spelling the native names is Tavera in his "Plantas Medicinales." In this work the consonants are pronounced as follows: g always as in get; h a gutturalized aspirate ; k as in English; w always as the initial w in English, as win, won; g̃  as ng in sing, hung, etc. While this method of spelling the native names has much to commend it, it has not been adopted in the present work, for the reason that no attempt has been made by the Americans so far to change the spelling of the words of the native dialects, and accordingly it was deemed advisable to retain the plant names under the spelling recorded.