Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/29



The guttural, dental, and labial tenues are naturally expressed by k, t, p.

The modification which changes these tenues into mediæ should consistently be expressed by a uniform diacritical sign attached to k, t, p. For more than one reason, however, we prefer the Latin letters, g, d, b.

It is understood that g, after once being chosen as the representative of the guttural media, like g in gun, whatever vowel may follow, could never be used promiscuously both for this and the palatal media, as the English g in gun and gin.

The aspirated tenues and mediæ in the guttural, dental, and palatal series, which, according to the description given above, are not compound, but simple though modified sounds, should be written by simple consonants with a diacritical mark of aspiration. This would give us:

These types have been cut many times, ever since Count Volney founded his prize at the French Academy for transcribing Oriental alphabets, and even before his time. They exist at Berlin, Paris, Leipzig, Darmstadt, Petersburg, and several other places. They have been cut in different sizes and on different bodies. Still the difficulty of having them at hand when required, of making them range properly, and of keeping always a sufficient stock of them, has been so great even in places like London, Paris, and Berlin, that their adoption would defeat the very object of our alphabet, which is to be used in Greenland as well as in Borneo, and is to be handled by unexperienced printers even in the most distant stations, where nothing but an ordinary English fount can be expected to exist. In our Missionary alphabet we must have no dots, no hooks, no accents, no Greek letters, no new types, no diacritical appendages whatsoever. No doubt, Missionary Societies might have all these letters cut and