Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/36

 have to write it ts, or ss, or whatever sound he may happen to hear. The five principal classes of physiological sounds would, therefore, have the following typographic exponents:—

In each of these five classes we have now to look for an exponent of the nasal.

Where the nasal is modified by the following consonant, it requires no modified sign, for reasons explained in the first part of our essay. The nasal in sink and sing is guttural; in inch and injure, palatal; in hint and bind, dental; in imp and dumb, labial.

But where these nasals occur at the beginning of words or at the end of syllables, they must have each its own mark. Let the dental nasal be n, the labial nasal m, the palatal nasal n. Where the guttural nasal is really so evanescent as not to bear to be expressed by ng, we must write n and a dot after it (n.), which makes no difficulty in printing, and will occur very rarely. What we call the palatal n is generally not a simple but a compound nasal, and should be written ny. For transliterating, however, we want a distinct sign, because the palatal nasal exists as a simple type in Sanskrit, and every single type must be transliterated by a single letter. Here I should propose an italic n.

The lingual n occurs in Sanskrit only. Its character is generally determined by lingual letters either following or preceding. Still, where it must be marked in Sanskrit transliterations, let it be represented by an inverted n.

The Latin letters which naturally offer themselves as the counterparts of the semi-vowels, are h, y, r, l, v, and w.