Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XIII.djvu/471

 PHCENIX PH<ENIX (Gr. $oivi% a mythical bird living in Arabia, resembling an eagle, with wings partly red and partly golden. On arriving at the age of 500 years it built a funeral pile of wood and aromatic gums, and, lighting it by the fanning of its wings, was consumed to ashes, out of which arose a new phoenix. The fathers of the church employed the myth to illustrate the resurrection ; and several of the Roman emperors used it on coins to typify their own apotheosis, or the return of the golden age under their rule. See Metral's Le phenix, ou Voiseau du soleil (Paris, 1824). PHCENIXVILLE, a borough of Chester co., Pennsylvania, on the right bank of the Schuyl- kill river, here crossed by two fine bridges, at the mouth of French creek, and on the Phila- delphia and Reading and the Pickering Valley railroads, 25 m. N. W. of Philadelphia, and 26 m. S. E. of Reading ; pop. in 1850, 2,670 ; in 1860, 4,886 ; in 1870, 5,292. The Delaware River and Lancaster railroad, a projected trunk line between New York and the west and south, is to pass through the borough, which is intersected by the Schuylkill navigation com- pany's canal. Phoenixville has an extensive trade with the surrounding country, which is rich in agricultural resources and contains mines of iron, copper, and lead, but it is chiefly de- voted to manufacturing. The Phoenix iron works cover about 150 acres, employing in brisk times about 1,500 men. There are large cop- per-smelting and refining works, an extensive pottery, a sash factory, and cotton mills, a pub- lic park and a fine cemetery, water and gas works, three national banks, four public school buildings with graded schools, a seminary, two weekly newspapers, and nine churches. PHONETICS (Gr. QovijTiKdc., pertaining to sound or speaking), the science of articulate sounds. Articulation depends on the organs of speech, and an adequate knowledge of their functions, and of the laws of sound, has been reached only in recent times through the labors of Brticke, Merkel, Thausing, and Helmholtz. The physiology of language, as far as it treats of the organs of speech and their functions, will be discussed under the title VOICE. In this article will be considered only the manner in which the various sounds making up a lan- guage are produced, their graphic representa- tion being reserved for the article WEITING. Every articulation is founded on an expulsion of breath, and sounds differ according to the number and character of the obstacles encoun- tered by a breath in the course of emission. To utter a vowel, the breath has to pass through a sort of tube formed by the mouth, and a, e, 2, 0, and u (pronounced as in Italian ah, ', 00) are produced by simple changes in the form of this tube, and in the case of a and e also by opening the cavity of the nose. For the French nasal vowels, un, on, in, an, the soft palate is brought down and the air made to vibrate through the cavities connecting the nose and pharynx. The simplest breathing PHONETICS 457 produces either the spiritus asper (our h) or the spiritus lenis, which the Greeks considered to be inherent in all initial vowels ; but the former requires besides the mere emission of the breath a certain position of the soft palate, and the latter a pressure of the glottis. Using the tongue, the hard palate, the teeth, or the lips, to interpose further barriers, these breaths can be modified in eight different ways. By lifting the tongue against the uvula when emit- ting the breath, we obtain the hard German ch, and with a slight check of the breath the German g; Jc is produced by contracting the tongue and placing it against the beginning of the hard palate, and if at the same time a hard breath is made to pass through this opening, the sound of the soft German ch is obtained, while the softening of the breath in this posi- tion will give the y in the word year. The hard breathing can be modified into an s, the soft into a z, by reaching with the tongue toward the teeth. Sh in ship and si in fusion (=zh) are formed by somewhat hollowing the tongue when drawing it back and allowing its lower surface to rise toward the back of the upper teeth or the palate. If in emitting the h the tip of the tongue actually touches either the edge or the back of the upper teeth, or is introduced a little way between the teeth, the sound is changed into the English th in three, which can be altered into the soft th in thee by emitting only the soft breathing or spiritus lenis. The lower lip brought against the upper teeth modi- fies the hard breathing into an/, the soft into a v. The German w requires the lips to be brought together when emitting a soft breathing. W hen the soft palate or the tip of the tongue is al- lowed to tremble and to interrupt the stream of air, the intermittent sound of r is produced, which can be rendered more indistinct by rais- ing the tongue and decreasing the vibrations. The sound of I is made by vibrating either one or both lateral edges of the tongue when placed against the upper teeth. The sounds Tc, t, and p are produced by checking the emission of breath ; the first by bringing the root of the tongue against the soft palate, the second by placing the tongue against the teeth, and the third by joining the lips. The English ch is a union of the sounds of t and sh. The differ- ence between p and o, t and d, ~k and g consists in a narrowing of the glottis for the latter, while for the former it is kept wide open. For the nasal checks ng, n, m, the breath is emitted through the nose, and at the same time somewhat detained. The hard aspirated checks Ich, th, ph (=Vh, Vh, p'h, as in uphold with the initial vowel omitted p'hold), of fre- quent occurrence in oriental languages, result from gathering the breath and letting it ex- plode audibly as soon as the consonantal con- tact is withdrawn; and the soft aspirates gJi, dh, Ih are made by allowing the soft breath- ing to be heard after removing the consonan- tal contact. Max Miiller has framed the fol- lowing scheme of the physiological alphabet: