Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/40

 whole, that little violence is done by this alphabet to the genius of any of these languages, and that neither an Englishman, nor a German, nor a Frenchman would ever feel much hesitation as to how any one of our letters should be pronounced.

The pronunciation of the vowels is more liable to change than that of the consonants. Hence we find that literary languages, which retain their orthography in spite of changes in pronunciation, have no scruple in expressing different sounds by the same sign; or, where two originally different vowels have sunk down to one and the same intermediate sound, we see that often the same sound is expressed by two different vowels. In the selection, therefore, of letters to express the general vowel sounds of our physiological alphabet, we can pay less attention to the present value of each vowel sign in the spoken languages of Europe than we did even with the consonants. And as there it was impossible, without creating an unwieldy mass of consonantal signs, to express all the slight shades of pronunciation by distinct letters, we shall have to make still greater allowance for dialectical varieties in the representation of vowels, where it would be hopeless should we attempt to depict in writing all the minute degrees in the sliding scale of native or foreign vowel sounds.

The reason why, in most systems of phonetic transcription, the Italian pronunciation of vowels has been taken as the normal pronunciation is, no doubt, that in Italian all vowel signs have but one sound, and the same sound is generally expressed by one and the same vowel. We propose, therefore, as in Italian, to represent the pure guttural vowel by a, the pure palatal vowel by i, and the pure labial vowel by u.

Besides the short a, we want one, or according to others, two graphic signs to represent the modified sound of the guttural a, which may be deflected from its pure sound by a slight and almost imperceptible palatal or labial pressure. These are the sounds which we have in "birch" and "work," and which we propose to write and. As we do not want the signs of ˘ and ¯ to mark the quantity of vowels, we may be allowed to use this sign ˘ to indicate indistinctness rather than brevity.