Page:Diary of ten years.djvu/448

 vi, with such aid as a long residence in the country, and constant communication with the natives, both in a public and private capacity, enabled me to impart, and such attention as the leisure of a sea voyage permitted me to bestow. I have been requested to undertake the task of editing and publishing it in England, in order to avoid the expense and difficulty which would have attended the printing of it in the colony.

The sounds of the letters are adopted from the orthography recommended in the Journal of the Royal Geographical Society. The consonants are to be sounded as in English, except that G is invariably hard; the vowels, for the most part, as in the following English words:–A, as in father, except when it has the short mark (ǎ) over it, or at the end of a word, when it is to be pronounced as in the first syllable of mamma; E, as in there, whether at the beginning, middle, or end of a word; I, as in fatigue; 0, as in old; Ow, as in cow, now; U, as in rude. With Y some liberty has been taken; it is used both as a consonant and a vowel. With its consonant form there is no difficulty; it is to be pronounced as in you, your, yoke. As a vowel it must invariably be sounded long, as in my, thy; and this sound in the middle of a word, after a consonant, is to be given to it unless separated from the preceding letter by a hyphen, when it becomes a consonant itself, as for example, Gyn, one. Y is here a long vowel; but in Gyn-yang (once) the y of the first syllable is a long vowel, and in the second is a consonant;–the same as in Byl-yi (a small leaf); By-yu (the Zamia fruit). The nasal sound, Ng, is of such frequent occurrence in the Australian language, as to have rendered its introduction necessary as a distinct and separate letter (if such an expression may be used) in every vocabulary which has been