Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/407

 SYLLABARIES. 877 This h moUiens is probably a feature of all languages. In Hebrew we have the softened forms of the Daghesh forte, bh, phy dh, th. In English we have cA, ah, zh, (azure), dh and th; for it seems quite reasonable to suppose that the soft ^A^ of ^ is but the old German article die; and any one can observe the difference in the breathing of ih in the two words, that thing, the former corresponding to a (2 with h moUiene, and the latter to a t with the same. This softening is more marked in Celtic than perhaps in any other language, — Hebrew not excepted, — ^for every one of its consonants is subject to it With the exception of the few defects pointed out, the Corean alphabet, for simplicity and utility, is the best known to me. In simplicity it is greatly superior to the complex alphabets of its neighbours, Manchu, Mongol, and Japanese, for these are Tables of syllables; so that in the majority of instances the " letter '' of the Manchu and Mongol syllabary is composed of two consonantal sounds with an intervening vowel, the Japanese syllabary being more simple, inasmuch as it includes in it only syllables ending with a vowel, while these form but a small proportion of the Manchu, in which ahan, shcmg, choong, chiwng, are each a separate letter. Thus the so-called Manchu twelve Radicals, which are really jvaoLa, are multiplied into many hundred letters. But while it is all but perfect in its table of syllables, the complexity of Manchu is quite a contrast to the beautiful simplicity of Corean. Besides the invariability of its vowels, Corean has the advantage over English of possessing separate letters for da, ta, or ch, and ng; but it has to represent ah by inserting the double vowel beginning with i after a; as for aha, a-i-a, for aho, a-i-o, &c. Like Manchu, it lacks a sign for French il so common in Chinese ; but while Manchu clumsily supplies the vacancy with the vowel combination i-o-i, the Corean uses one of its two forms of the letter u (of fun). Manchu, on the other hand, has separate letters for /, w, I, r, and the zh, or French j of Chinese. It has letters for da and ta, which, however, appear as if supperadded long after the formation of the alphabet proper, and were possibly formed to