Page:Poetry of the Magyars.djvu/31

Rh a curious aspect; as lát (sees), the root; láthat, he can see; látás (seeing or sight); látó, the seeer (the prophet); látni, to see; látatlan, unseen; látható, seeable; láthatoság, seeable- ness; látatatlan, unseeable; láthattalak, I might have seen thee; láthatatlanság, unseeableness; láthatatlonoknak, to the unseeable (pl. Dat.).

In the Magyar alphabet the y, after g, l, n, and t, produces that sound which melts into the fol- lowing letter; as, in French, gn, ll, in mon- tagne, medaille: cs, ts, are equivalent to our ch; sz, to s; zs, to the French j; tz or cz to z; and s to the English sh. The effect of an accent is to lengthen the vowel; ö and ü (&#xf6;&#x301; and ǘ, or ő and ű long) have nearly the sounds of the French eu and u. The whole number of sounds in the Magyar is thirty-eight, and their ortho- graphy, like that of all the Gothic and Slavo- nic nations, has to struggle with the imper- fections of the Roman alphabet in representing sounds unknown to the Latins. The character- istic of the Latin alphabet is poverty, and its inconvenience and inaptitude to many of the idioms into which it has been introduced, are very striking. It is thus that strangers are so perplexed with our two th 's, as in thing and that; the þ and the ð of the Anglo Saxons, the θ and