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 Portuguese, and yet another, the French and so on;—we can, rightly affirm, that the alphabetic characters, above indicated, have been, as a rule, considered sufficient and quite apropriate to the phonetic usages of the Brasilian language.

Consonants

13.—We preferred this letter—s, instead of —c before e, i, and ç, which have been adopted by some writers.

It is observed, that the hissing of s is contrary to the savage's pronunciation. But we cannot admit of such a reason, as a good one; because it cannot be denied, that the syllables ça, ce, ci, have the same phonetic value, as, sa, se, si, in Latin pronunciation.

Moreover, the s has in itself the advantage of replacing the two characters—ç, c, ( the latter before e, i), and, therefore, it will be used in this book, as representative of the sound c, in the word city.