Page:Proposals for a missionary alphabet; submitted to the Alphabetical Conferences held at the residence of Chevalier Bunsen in January 1854 (IA cu31924100210388).pdf/44

 alluded to, whether the h of aspirated consonants expresses their aspirated nature or an independent guttural semi-vowel or flatus. Let the h, where it is not meant as a letter, but as a diacritical sign, be printed as an italic h, and the last ground for complaint will vanish. Still this is only needful for philological objects; for practical purposes the common h may remain.

In writing, the dots or lines under the palatals will have to be retained. Still they take too much time thus employed to allow us to suppose that the Africans will retain them when they come to write for themselves. They will find some more current marks; as, for instance, by drawing the last stroke of the letter below the line. In writing, however, anybody may please himself, so long as the printer knows what is intended when he has to bring it before the public. As a hint to German missionaries, I beg to say that, for writing quickly in this new alphabet, they will find it useful in manuscript notes to employ German letters instead of italics.

An accidental, though by no means undesirable, advantage is gained by using italics to express the palatals. If we read that Sanskrit vâch (or vâtch, or vâtsch) is the same as Latin vox, but that sometimes vách in Sanskrit is vâk or vàc, the eye imagines that it has three different words to deal with. By means of italics, vak and vâk are almost identical to the sight, as kirk and kurk (church), would be if English were ever to be transcribed into the missionary alphabet. The same applies to the verb, where the phonetic distinction between vakmi, vakshi, vakti, can thus be expressed without in any way disguising the etymological identity of the root. It would be wrong if we allowed the physiological principles of our alphabet to be modified for the sake of comparative philology; but where the phonetic changes of physiological sounds and the historical changes of words happen to run parallel, an alphabet, if well arranged, should be capable of giving this fact clear expression.

If the pronunciation of the palatals is deteriorated, they sometimes take the sound of tch, ts, s, sl, or even th. Coelum (kolor) becomes Italian cielo; where the initial sound is the same as in church (kirk). In old Friesic we have "tzaka" instead of English "check." In French, "ciel" is pronounced with an initial sharp dental's; "chose," with an initial sharp palatal's. In Spanish, the pronuncia-