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 can be conveniently cast and set, and dictionaries where words may be easily and certainly found, seem as unattainable as ever.

It seems that the adjustment of the consonant-scheme

should have been much easier; but it was much more clumsily accomplished, if the scheme in present Siamese is to be taken as the Prince's. The consonant sounds in present Siamese are only twenty-one in number; and though some changes have probably taken place in the six centries [sic] which have elapsed, the total number then can hardly have been very different from what it is now. The Indian consonant letters were thirty-three—giving, let us say, twelve supernumeraries to be stricken off the list, or else to be used only in rendering Indian words. But there were the

"tones" to be somehow indicated in writing. The easiest and most obvious plan would doubtless have been to indicate these directly by a series of accents. But those supernumerary letters seem to have led to the suggestion that they might somehow be used in indicating the "tones" of the vowels which follow them. To work out the suggestion completely by providing one letter of each sort for every tone, would require—if there were then as many tones as there are now in Siamese—no less than six times twenty-one, that is one hundred and twenty six letters. That being impossible, the compromise actually reached would seem to have been somewhat as follows:—1) One group of consonant-sounds, chiefly the non-aspirates and the aspirates, was actually provided with two letter symbols for each sound, the two letters indicating different tonal quality. The two parallel sets so formed were the so-called "high" and "low" letters. Each naturally gave its tone to the vowel which followed it. These two "inherent" tones were further susceptible of different modification by the use of two accent marks, the "ek" and the "tho," and also to some extent by final consonants; so that in the case of these letters all the required tones could be positively, though very clumsily, indicated. 2) A second group of sounds, mostly semi-vowels and nasals, was furnished with but one letter apiece, and that a "low" letter. To make good their deficiency, and to enable them to represent all of the required tones as well as their more favored companions could, it was arranged that whenever necessary one of the "high" letters should