Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/116

94 our ditto is the Latin dictum, 'said'; we say dis-join, but dif-fuse; in-different, but im-possible; ad-dict, but an-nul, ap-pend, as-sign, ac-cede, af-firm, ag-gress, al-lude, am-munition.

If the consonants are thus variously liable to pass into one another, a yet higher degree of mobility belongs to the vowels. It is needless to go into particulars upon this point; the condition of our own vowel-system is a sufficient illustration of it. The letters a, e, i, o, u were originally devised and intended to represent the vowel-sounds in far, prey, pique, pole, and rule, respectively, and they still have those values, constantly or prevailingly, in most of the other languages which employ them. But, during the written period of our own tongue, the pronunciation of its vowels has undergone—partly under the influence of circumstances which are still clearly to be pointed out—very sweeping and extensive changes, while our words have continued to be spelt nearly as formerly; and the consequence has been a grand dislocation of our orthographical system, a divorcement of our written from our spoken alphabet. Our written vowels have from three to nine values each, and they are supplemented in use by a host of digraphs, of equally variable pronunciation; our spoken vowels have each from two to twelve written representatives. All the internal relations of our sounds are turned awry; what we call "long" and "short" a, or i, or u, or e, or o, are really no more related to one another as corresponding long and short, than dog and cat, sun and moon, are related to one another as corresponding male and female. With our consonants, also, the case is but little better than with our vowels: our words, as we write them, are full of silent and ambiguous signs of every class, unremoved ruins of an overthrown phonetic structure. And our sense of the fitness of things has become so debauched by our training in the midst of these vicious surroundings, that it seems to us natural and proper that the same sound should be written in many different ways, the same sign have many different sounds; the great majority of us seriously believe and soberly maintain that a historical is preferable to a phonetic spelling—that is to say, that it is better to write our words as we imagine that somebody else pronounced them a long time