Page:Transactions NZ Institute Volume 18.djvu/86

56 French is the foreign language which is most taught in England. The consequence is that Englishmen suppose there is no such thing as a phonetic language. If German, Italian, and Spanish were more taught they would learn to understand the subject.

A few more peculiarities of English present themselves. Cacao we spell cocoa, and pronounce coco. Bilbao used to be, and often is still, spelt ''Bilboa. Kakatua we spell and pronounce cockatoo''. The name has nothing to do with a cock; the bird may be a hen. Kaka is the generic name for parrot among many languages of the East, and kakatua is that of the particular family.

Chinchona we spell cinchona, and generally pronounce as if it were an Italian word. The name, if Spanish, was derived from that of the Countess Chinchon, wife of the Captain-General of Peru, and ch in Spanish is always soft, as it is generally in English. There is, no doubt, the authority of Linnæus for cinchona, but he evidently made a mistake in this name.

In the first attempt of a child to speak he says ba, and this whether he is of English or any other race. When the child grows up and goes to school we tell him that a = 'e, and therefore that ba ought to be bae. Luckily he knows better, he has found out by instinct that ba is ba, and not bae. Afterwards he learns to say papa and mamma, and notwithstanding the teachings of his alphabet, he does not call them paepae and maemae. Advancing in age he speaks of his father, not faether; although, strange to say, the Scotch adopt the latter sound, contrary to their usual habit of broadening the vowel a.

In these days of æstheticism it is utterly impossible that the orthography of the English language can remain long in its present barbarous and almost ludicrous state, but the change to a more correct system must be brought about by real linguists and men of taste, men who thoroughly understand the Teutonic languages—not only German, but Dutch, Flemish, and the allied Scandinavian tongues. Until some result is arrived at by men of the above-named qualifications, it would be much better for both English and Americans to desist from any premature changes.

It appears to me to be a misfortune that the Teutonic name berg, mountain, should have been lost to the English language, except in iceberg, and the Romance names mount, mountain, substituted. Mount may generally be considered as a diminutive of mountain, but we find it applied to mountains of the greatest elevation. Thus we find in Mount Cook, Mount Everest, and other mountains of the first class, the name mount filling the position which it does in the Mounts Pleasant, or Brown, or other small elevations in the vicinity of English towns. Cookberg and Everestberg would be infinitely better. In New