Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/14

 written by the same sign, while Csoma de Körös writes the initial guttural n by ň, the final by ng; as "ňa-rang."

We have now, on physiological grounds, established the following system of consonants:

According to Sanskrit grammarians, if we begin to pronounce the tenuis, but, instead of stopping it abruptly, allow it to come out with what they call the corresponding "wind" (flatus, wrongly called sibilans), we produce the aspirata, as a modified tenuis, not as a double consonant. This is intelligible for the tenuis aspirata, but less so for the media aspirata. Other grammarians, therefore, maintain that the mediæ aspiratæ are formed by pronouncing the mediæ with a final h, not the flatus, but the semi-vowel; and they insist on this principally because the aspirated sonants could not be said to merge into, or terminate by, a surd sibilant. Accepting this view of the formation of these aspirates, to which we have no corresponding sounds in English, we may now represent the complete table of all consonantal sounds possible in any dialect, as follows:—

It should be remarked that in the course of time the fine distinctions between kh, gh, and, between ph, bh, and f, become generally merged into one common sound. In Sanskrit only, and in some of the southern languages of India, through the influence of Sanskrit, the distinction has been maintained. Instead of Sanskrit th we find in Latin the simple t; instead of dh, the simple d, or, as a nearer approach, the f (dhuma = fumus, &c.). The etymological distinction maintained in Sanskrit between "dha," to put, to create, and "da," to