Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/483

XII.] of which the Japanese words were made up: for the spoken alphabet of the language then included only ten consonants and five vowels, and no syllable contained more than one vowel, with a single preceding consonant. A similar alphabet was devised for the Cherokee language, not many years ago, by an ingenious member of the tribe, George Guess, who, though he had never learned to read English, had seen and possessed English books, and knew in general what was their use: it contained eighty-five signs, mostly fashioned out of English letters, though with total disregard of their original value.

Another and a less pure form of syllabic alphabet is that which treats the consonant alone as the substantial part of the syllable, and looks upon the vowel as something of subordinate consequence—as it were, a colouring or affection of the consonant. In its view, then, only the consonant has a right to be written, or to be written in full; the accompanying vowel, if taken note of at all, must be indicated by some less conspicuous sign, attached to the consonant. Peculiar and arbitrary as this mode of conceiving of the syllable may seem to us, it is historically of the highest importance; for upon it was founded the construction of the ancient Semitic alphabet, which has been the parent of the methods of writing used by the great majority of enlightened nations, since the beginning of history. It is not difficult to see how the character of Semitic language should have prompted, or at least favoured, such an estimate of the comparative value of vowel and consonant. In Semitic roots and words (as was explained in the eighth lecture  ), the consonants are the principally significant, the substantial, element; the vowels bear a subordinate office, that of indicating, as formative elements, the modifications and relations of the radical idea; the former are stable and invariable, the latter liable to constant change. Perhaps we should not be going too far, if we were to say that only a language so constructed could have such an alphabet. Be this as it may, the ancient Semitic alphabet—of which the Phenician is the generally accepted type, being, whether original or not, its oldest traceable form—was a system of twenty-two signs, all of them possessing