Page:Book of record of the time capsule of cupaloy (New York World's fair, 1939).djvu/29

 its enormous irregularities. It is equally clear that if peculiar symbols be given to some of these thirty-three sounds, it will be bothersome for typewriter & newspaper equipment which has only the twenty-six letters. The letter j therefore is used instead of the inverted e, which last would require a special type, and digraphs, & in two instances trigraphs, are used instead of special vowel and consonant letters.

English has eight vowels [or sounds whose hemming amounts to mere cavity-shape resonance] and twenty-five consonants [whose hemming amounts to closure, violent restriction, or closure followed by restriction].

The vowels are all pronounced between the k and the y consonant positions, that is, between the back-of-the-tongue and the middle-of-the-tongue positions. The vowel with highest raised back of the tongue, that is, nearest to the k consonant position, is u; the vowel with the highest raised middle of the tongue, that is, nearest to the y consonant position, is i. w is here classified as a lip sound, though it is simultaneously a back-of-the-tongue sound. The other vowels have intermediate positions between the extreme u and i, a being the most open and j the most central positioned. The digraph ae. stands for a vowel midway, perhaps, between e and a; ao, for a vowel midway, perhaps, between a and o. Vowels occur short and long. Since the letter c always stands for k or s, it is not needed for regular consonant duty and is here pressed into service as a long mark, being written as a silent character after a vowel where it is necessary to mark it as being long. Many vowels are long in English by simple rules, and in such instances the length sign c is not [ 21 ]