Page:The grammar of English grammars.djvu/169

 these sounds may easily be written in a plain sentence of three or four lines upon almost any subject; and every one who can read, is familiar with them all, and with all the letters. Now it is either easy to count them, or it is difficult. If difficult, wherein does the difficulty lie? and how shall he who knows not what and how many they are, think himself capable of reforming our system of their alphabetic signs? If easy, why do so few pretend to know their number? and of those who do pretend to this knowledge, why are there so few that agree? A certain verse in the seventh chapter of Ezra, has been said to contain all the letters. It however contains no j; and, with respect to the sounds, it lacks that of f, that of th sharp, and that of u in bull. I will suggest a few additional words for these; and then both all the letters, and all the sounds, of the English language, will be found in the example; and most of them, many times over: "'And I, even I, Artaxerxes, the king, do make a decree to all the treasurers' who 'are beyond the river, that whatsoever Ezra the priest, the scribe of the law of the God of heaven, shall require of you, it be done speedily' and faithfully, according to that which he shall enjoin." Some letters, and some sounds, are here used much more frequently than others; but, on an average, we have, in this short passage, each sound five times, and each letter eight. How often, then, does a man speak all the elements of his language, who reads well but one hour!

OBS. 6.--Of the number of elementary sounds in our language, different orthoëpists report differently; because they cannot always agree among themselves, wherein the identity or the simplicity, the sameness or the singleness, even of well-known sounds, consists; or because, if each is allowed to determine these points for himself, no one of them adheres strictly to his own decision. They may also, each for himself, have some peculiar way of utterance, which will confound some sounds which other men distinguish, or distinguish some which other men confound. For, as a man may write a very bad hand which shall still be legible, so he may utter many sounds improperly and still be understood. One may, in this way, make out a scheme of the alphabetic elements, which shall be true of his own pronunciation, and yet have obvious faults when tried by the best usage of English speech. It is desirable not to multiply these sounds beyond the number which a correct and elegant pronunciation of the language obviously requires. And what that number is, it seems to me not very difficult to ascertain; at least, I think we may fix it with sufficient accuracy for all practical purposes. But let it be remembered, that all who have hitherto attempted the enumeration, have deviated more or less from their own decisions concerning either the simplicity or the identity of sounds; but, most commonly, it appears to have been thought expedient to admit some exceptions concerning both. Thus the long or diphthongal sounds of I and U, are admitted by some, and excluded by others; the sound of j, or soft g, is reckoned as simple by some, and rejected as compound by others; so a part, if not all, of what are called the long and the short vowels, as heard in ale and ell, arm and am, all and on, isle or eel and ill, tone and tun, pule or pool and pull, have been declared essentially the same by some, and essentially different by others. Were we to recognize as elementary, no sounds but such as are unquestionably simple in themselves, and indisputably different in quality from all others, we should not have more sounds than letters: and this is a proof that we have characters enough, though the sounds are perhaps badly distributed among them.

OBS. 7.--I have enumerated thirty-six well known sounds, which, in compliance with general custom, and for convenience in teaching. I choose to regard as the oral elements of our language. There may be found some reputable authority for adding four or five more, and other authority as reputable, for striking from the list seven or eight of those already mentioned. For the sake of the general principle, which we always regard in writing, a principle of universal grammar, that there can be no syllable without a vowel, I am inclined to teach, with Brightland, Dr. Johnson, L. Murray, and others, that, in English, as in French, there is given to the vowel e a certain very obscure sound which approaches, but amounts not to an absolute suppression, though it is commonly so regarded by the writers of dictionaries. It may be exemplified in the words ''oven, shovel, able;[99] or in the unemphatic article the'' before a consonant, as in the sentence, "Take the nearest:" we do not hear it as "thee nearest," nor as "then carest," but more obscurely. There is also a feeble sound of i or y unaccented, which is equivalent to ee uttered feebly, as in the word diversity. This is the most common sound of i and of y. The vulgar are apt to let it fall into the more obscure sound of short u. As elegance of utterance depends much upon the preservation of this sound from such obtuseness, perhaps Walker and others have done well to mark it as e in me; though some suppose it to be peculiar, and others identify it with the short i in fit. Thirdly, a distinction is made by some writers, between the vowel sounds heard in hate and bear, which Sheridan and Walker consider to be the same. The apparent difference may perhaps result from the following consonant r, which is apt to affect the sound of the vowel which precedes it. Such words as ''bear, care, dare, careful, parent'', are very liable to be corrupted in pronunciation, by too