Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/32

 The natural way of writing the palatals, so as not to obscure their close relationship to the gutturals, would be,, h, , h.

But here the same difficulty arises as before. If the dots or lines are printed separately, the lines where these dots occur become more distant than the rest. For one such dotted letter the compositor has to compose a whole line of blanks. These will shift, particularly when there are corrections, and the misprints are endless. But they might be cast on one type. True, they might be—perhaps they will be. At all events they have been, and Volney has offered them to anybody that would ask for them. Still, when I want them at a press like the University press of Oxford, I cannot get them. We must not expect that what is impossible in the nineteenth century at Oxford will be possible in the twentieth century at Timbuktu.

Now the difficulty, as far as I can see, was solved by a compositor to whom I sent some MS., where each palatal letter was marked by a line under it. The compositor, not knowing what these lines meant, took them for the usual marks of italics, and I was surprised when I saw that this answered the purpose, saved much trouble and much expense, and, on the whole, did not look bad. As every English fount includes italic letters, the usefulness of these modified types for our Missionary alphabet "springs into the eyes," as we say in German. They startle the eye sufficiently to remind the reader of their modified pronunciation, and at the same time they indicate, as in most cases they ought to do, their original guttural character to the reflecting mind of the philologist. As in ordinary books italics are used to attract attention, they will have to do the same in our alphabet. Even to people who never heard the names of guttural and palatal letters, they will show that the k is not the usual k. Persons in the slightest degree acquainted with phonetics will be made aware that the k is, in shape and sound, a modification of the k. All who admit that palatals are modifications of gutturals would see at once that the modification intended by k could only be palatal. As to the proper pronunciation of the k, as palatal tenuis, in different dialects, people who have to read their own language written in this alphabet would never hesitate about its pronunciation. Others must learn it, as they now learn the pronunciation of Italian ci and chi; or they must rest satisfied if they know that k is meant for the