Page:Proposals for a missionary alphabet; submitted to the Alphabetical Conferences held at the residence of Chevalier Bunsen in January 1854 (IA cu31924100210388).pdf/42



Palatals are modifications of gutturals, and therefore the most natural course would be to express them by the guttural series, adding only a line or an accent or a dot, or any other uniform diacritical sign to indicate their modified value. So great, however, has been the disinclination to use diacritical signs, that in common usage, where the palatal tenuis had to be expressed, the most anomalous expedients have been resorted to in order to avoid hooks or dots. In English, to represent the Sanskrit palatal tenuis, ch has been used; and as the h seemed to be too much in the teeth of all analogy, the simple c even has been adopted, leaving ch for the aspirated palatal. On the same ground, the Germans write tsch for the palatal tenuis, and tschh for the aspirate. The French write tch and tehl. The Italians do not hesitate to use ci for the tenuis, though I do not see how they could express the corresponding aspirate. The Russians recommend their; and the Brahmans would probably recommend a Sanskrit type. Still all, even the German tschh, are meant to represent simple consonants, which, as in Sanskrit, would not make a preceding short vowel long. That in English the ch, in Italian ci, and in German tsch, have a sound very like the palatal tenuis, is of course a merc accident. In English the ch is not always sounded alike; and its pronunciation in the different dialects of Europe varies more than that of most letters. Besides, our alphabetic representative of the palatal sound is to be pronounced and comprehended, not by a few people in Germany or Italy, but by all the nations of Africa and Australia. Now to them the ch would prove deceptive; first, because we never use the simple c (by this we make up for the primary alphabetical divorce introduced by the libertus of Spurius Carvilius Ruga), and, secondly, because the h would seem to indicate the modification of the aspirate.

The natural way of writing the palatals, so as not to obscure their close relationship to the gutturals, would be, k, kh, §, gh.

But here the same difficulty arises as before. If the dots or marks are printed separately, the lines where these dots occur become more distant than the rest. For one such dotted letter the compositor has to compose a whole line of blanks. These will shift, particularly when there are corrections, and the misprints are endless.