Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/54

 occur where languages grow and change, while their orthography remains stationary. Such discrepancies between spelling and pronunciation can be removed only by authority, and that authority rests alone with the people who speak and write the language. None, however, stands more in need of phonetic reform than English—none would look stranger whether transcribed or transliterated. For written languages, all that can be done by means of transliteration is to save people the trouble of learning the numerous alphabets of the East. The orthography, however, must be retained, as it has become fixed in the history of every literature; and those who wish to pronounce correctly foreign names of places or persons transliterated according to their proper mode of spelling, must either learn the pronunciation of the language whence they are taken, or be satisfied to pronounce according to the fashion of their own idiom.

These, however, are questions with which the Missionary Societies are not for the present concerned. Literary Societies and Academies will have to settle these points; and, let us hope that they will soon follow the good example which the Missionary Societies of England, Germany, and we may hope America, are going to set them.

Oxford, Christmas, 1853.