Page:Proposals for a missionary alphabet; submitted to the Alphabetical Conferences held at the residence of Chevalier Bunsen in January 1854 (IA cu31924100210388).pdf/50

 as hcard in "life" and "find." The soft labial flatus ought consistently to be written as f with a spiritus lenis. But here again I fear we must sacrifice consistency to expediency, and adopt that sign with which we are familiar, the Latin v. As we express the labial semivowel by w, the v is still at our disposal, and will probably be preferred by the unanimous votes of missionaries and printers.

The lingual flatus is a sound peculiar to Sanskrit, and, owing to its hollow guttural pronunciation, it may be expressed there, as it has been hitherto, by's followed by the guttural h (sh). The Sanskrit knows no soft sibilants; hence we require but one representation for the lingual slı.

The different categories of consonantal sounds which we represented at the end of the first chapter by means of English words may now be filled out by the following graphic exponents:

Although these exponents of the physiological categories of articulated sound have not been chosen because their present pronunciation in English, or French, or German is nearest to that physiological category which each has to represent, still, as we have avoided letters of which the pronunciation fluctuates very much (such as c, j, x, q), it will be found, on the 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 will 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