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It will be instructive to set down a table of form sequences, a kind of gross history of the words foot, feet, mouse, mice for the last 1500 years: It will not be necessary to list the phonetic laws that gradually differentiated the modern German equivalents of the original West Germanic forms from their English cognates. The following table gives a rough idea of the form sequences in German:
Thus Achilles may as easily mean 'holder of the people' as 'holder of stones, i.e. a River-god! Max Muller replies, perhaps not, as far as the phonetic rules go 'which determine the formation of appellative nouns. It, indeed, would be extraordinary if it were. . . . The phonetic rules in Hottentot may also suggest difficulties to a South African Curtius!
Uncertainty of the origin of phonetic writing. Cadmus's alphabet. Difficulties attending the introduction of it. Different modes of writing. The art of writing at first very little used. Proofs of this. Story of the lots. Other instances. The invention of papyrus. Mode of manufacturing papyrus. Mode of using ancient books. Ink. Ink found at Herculaneum.
What white man can repeat from memory a history of equal length after so long an interval? Phonetic methods of recording Indian languages are not wholly satisfactory. It is very unlikely that two persons will adopt the same spelling of a word never heard before. Many inflections, accents, and gutturals of Indian languages are difficult to reduce to writing.
In the first place, sound alone guided the writers, and Indian pronunciation is frequently indistinct in the vowels and variable according to the individual hence the frequent interchange in the Spanish sources of a and o, ó and u, e and i. For many sounds even the alphabets of civilized speech have not adequate phonetic signs.
Since the invention of the cuneiform alphabet, by which pictures have been reduced to phonetic signs, the attempt has been made to arrange or classify these gods according to their proper order in the Pantheon, but thus far much obscurity and doubt seem to pervade their history.
They spun and wove cotton, which they dyed with brilliant colors; they had a system of writing which, while largely pictorial, contained some phonetic elements. They are still a vital people, more than holding their own in the present population, and forcing their native language upon the white invaders.
Semble as the lawyers say that this idea was born of great phonetic facts in the days when a seaman knew his duty better than the way to spell it; and when, if his outlook were sharpened by a friendly wring from the captain of the watch, he never dreamed of a police court. But Robin Lyth had never cared to ask why he wore ear-rings. His nature was not meditative.
We say that the sincere believer has no right to vote, simply because he has voted. A correspondent asks me to make more lucid my remarks about phonetic spelling. I have no detailed objection to items of spelling-reform; my objection is to a general principle; and it is this.
The phonetic symbols are abbreviated by grammalogues and contractions, and this proceeds in accordance with a principle unconsciously recognised but which really depends on the same inherent necessity to preserve in a consistent form the expression of the radical vocables of Speech.
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