Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/17

 distinct etymological and grammatical purposes, still it will be well to remember that the palatals are more nearly related to the gutturals than to any other class, and that in most languages the two are still interchangeable.

That the pronunciation of the palatals may vary again, like that of the gutturals, requires no explanation. Some people imagine they perceive a difference between the English palatal in "church," and the Italian palatal in "cielo," and they maintain that no Englishman can properly pronounce the Italian palatal. If so, it only proves what was said before, that slight modifications like these do never co-exist in the same language; that English has but one, and Italian but one palatal, though the two may slightly differ. But even if we invented a special letter to represent the Italian palatal, no one except an Italian would be able to pronounce it for his very life, as little as the French were able to pronounce "ceci" and "ciceri" at the time of the Sicilian Vespers. All consonants, therefore, which are no longer gutturals, and not yet dentals, should be called palatals. That palatals have again a tendency toward becoming dentals, may be seen from words like "" instead of "katvaras" or "keturi."

Frequently the pronunciation of the palatals becomes so broad that they seem, and in some cases really are, double consonants. Some people pronounce "church" (kirk) as if it were written "tshurtsh." If this pronunciation becomes sanctioned, and we have to deal with a language which has as yet no historical orthography, it must be left to the ear of the missionary to determine whether he hears distinctly two consonants, or one only though pronounced rather fully and broadly. If he hears distinctly the two sounds t + sh, he should write both, particularly if in the same language there exists another series of letters with the simple palatal sound. This is the case, for instance, in Tibetan and its numerous dialects. If, therefore, the missionary has to deal with a Bhotîya dialect, which has not yet been fixed by the Tibetan alphabet, the simple palatals should be kept distinct from the compound palatals, tsh, dsh, &c. In the literary language of Tibet, where the Sanskrit alphabet has been adopted, an artificial distinction has been introduced, and the compound sounds, usually transcribed as tsh, tshh, and dsh, are distinguished by a diacritical mark at the top from the simple palatals, the sound of which is