Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/33

 palatal tenuis, and not for anything else. Sooner or later this expedient is sure to be adopted. Thus we get, as the representatives of the palatals,

Now it will appear, also, how we can avoid the ambiguity alluded to before, as to whether the h of aspirated consonants expresses their aspirated nature or an independent guttural semi-vowel or flatus. Let the h, where it is not meant as a letter, but as a diacritical sign, be printed as an italic h, and the last ground for complaint will vanish. Still this is necessary for philological purposes only; for practical purposes the common h may remain.

In writing, the dots or lines under the palatals will have to be retained. Still they take too much time in writing to allow us to suppose that the Africans will retain them when they come to write for themselves. They will find some more current marks; as, for instance, by drawing the last stroke of the letter below the line. However, in writing, anybody may please himself, as long as the printer knows what is intended when he has to bring it before the public. As a hint to German missionaries, I beg to say that, for writing quickly with this new alphabet, they will find it useful in their manuscript notes to write German letters instead of italics.

An accidental, though by no means undesirable, advantage is gained by using italics to express the palatals. If we read that Sanskrit vâch (or vâtch, or vâtsch) is the same as Latin vox, but that sometimes vâch in Sanskrit is vâk or vâc, the eye imagines that it has three different words to deal with. By means of italics, vâk and vâk are almost identical to the eye, as kirk and kurk (church), would be if English were ever to be transcribed into the missionary alphabet. The same applies to the verb, where the phonetic distinction between vakmi, vakshi, vakti, can now be expressed without in any way disguising the etymological identity of the root. It would be wrong if we allowed the physiological principles of our alphabet to be modified for the sake of comparative philology; but where the phonetic changes of physiological sounds and the historical changes of words happen to run parallel, an alphabet, if well arranged, should always be capable of expressing this clearly.

If the pronunciation of the palatals is deteriorated, they sometimes