Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/50

 palatal media, g, then we cannot resist the current of alphabetical revolutions, but are forced to transliterate uniformly گ by g, and ج by g.

The guttural semi-vowel in Hebrew was hain. That the pronunciation of the guttural semi-vowel may be broader, so as to approach to the aspirated guttural media, and slighter, so as to be lost altogether, has been explained before. In Arabic, the former modification has been fixed graphically by a dot over the hain, and instead of this dotted ain it might, perhaps, be allowed to write gh.

Hebrew and Arabic, which are deficient in palatals, have what we described as compound or secondary palatals; sounds which in Tibetan are marked by diacritical signs added to the palatal types, but which, if their phonetic value had to be represented, should be written as double consonants, ts and ds.

As, however, in Hebrew and Arabic they are represented by single types, they must be transliterated by single types, the tenuis by German, the media by an English z.