Page:Proposals for a missionary alphabet; submitted to the Alphabetical Conferences held at the residence of Chevalier Bunsen in January 1854 (IA cu31924100210388).pdf/56

 logical theories. The Missionary should give a true transcript of a spoken language, and leave it to others to decipher it. He who, instead of doing this, attempts, according to his own theories, to improve upon the irregular utterance of savages, would deprive us of authentic documents the loss of which is irreparable. He would act like a traveller who, after copying an inscription according to what he thought, ought to have been its meaning, destroyed the original; nay, he may falsify unawares the ethnic history of the human race.

Several sentences having been once written down, the Missionary should put them by for a time, and then read them aloud to the natives. If they understand what he reads, and if they understand it even if read by somebody else, his work has been successful, and a translation of the Bible carried out on these principles among Papuas or Khyengs will assuredly one day become the basis for the literature of the future.

Although the basis of our Standard Alphabet is purely pbysiological, still no letter has been admitted into it, which does not actually occur in one of the well known languages of Asia or Europe. The number of letters might easily have been increased, if we had attempted to represent all the slight shades of pronunciation, which affect certain letters in different languages, dialects, patois, or in the mouth of individuals. But to increase the number of letters is tantamount to diminishing the usefulness of an alphabet.

It may happen, indeed, as we become acquainted, through the persevering labours of Missionaries, with the numerous tongues of Africa, Polynesia, and Asia, that new sounds will have to be acknow. ledged, and will have an independent place allotted to them in our system. But here it should be a principle, as binding as any of the principles which have guided us in the composition of our alphabet, that

"No new sound should ever be acknowledged as such, until we are able to give a clear and scientific definition of it on physiological grounds."

We are too prone perhaps to imagine, particularly where we have to deal with languages gathered from the mouth of a single interpreter, or in the intercourse with a few travellers, that we hear sounds of an entirely new character, and apparently requiring a new sign.