Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/22



The organic succession of vowel sounds is the same as for consonants,—guttural, palatal, labial, a, i, u. The succession of vowel sounds produced by the gradual lengthening of a musical pipe of a particular construction, is an interesting experiment as to the scale of sound in the abstract. It gives

But as these pipes are square or round, at all events regular, while the construction of the pipe formed by throat, palate, jaws, and lips is not, the succession of vowels given by these pipes cannot be expected to correspond with the real succession of vowels as formed by the organs of speech.

If we pay attention to the successive contraction of the throat only, we shall find, indeed, that the aperture of the throat is smallest if we pronounce the Italian i, and that it gets gradually larger as we pronounce e, a, o, u. But if we pay attention to the successive contraction of the lips, which is quite as essential to the formation of the vowels as the contraction of the throat, we shall have a very different scale. We shall find the aperture of the lips largest if we pronounce the a, and we shall see it gradually decrease as we go on to the e, i, o, and u.

If we represent the opening of the lips by Roman, and the opening of the throat by English figures; if then we put the smallest aperture as one unit, we may represent the five vowels in a mathematical progression:

= III. 1. e = IV. 2. a = V. 3. o = II. 4. u = I 5.

Besides the three vowels struck at the guttural, palatal, and labial points of contact, the Sanskrit, in strict analogy, forms two peculiar vowels as modifications of the lingual and dental semi-vowels. R and L, subjected to the same process which changes h into a, y into