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Thus Dr. Henry Bradley writes, 'This question does not seem to me to be settled by the mere fact that all recent classical editors reject the ligatures, just as most of them reject other aids to pronunciation which the ancients had not, such as j, v, for consonantal i, u. Many printers have conformed the spelling of English words in this respect to the practice of editors of Latin texts.
Darwin himself confessed that some of his arguments were convincing; and Munro, the scholar, complimented him for his paper on Lucretius and the Atomic Theory. In 1878 he constructed a phonograph from the newspaper reports of this new invention, and lectured on it at a bazaar in Edinburgh, then employed it to study the nature of vowel and consonantal sounds.
By throwing off the vocal and consonantal terminations, and by the weakening or rejection of the vowels, this soft and melodious language was gradually changed in character, and became intolerably harsh and rugged.
Suffice it that the analysis was made; that one sign and no more was adopted for each consonantal sound of the Semitic tongue, and that the entire cumbersome mechanism of the Egyptian and Babylonian writing systems was rendered obsolescent. These systems did not yield at once, to be sure; all human experience would have been set at naught had they done so.
The study of consonantal sounds without the use of vowel sounds is very indefinite and unsatisfactory. Ko-Ok Aspirate. Thus: 1st Point. Go-Og Sub-vocal. To-Ot Aspirate. 2d Point. Do-Od Sub-vocal. Po-Op Aspirate. 3d Point. Bo-Ob Sub-vocal Exaggerate the consonantal sounds in every instance, and the points of contact or places of articulation will be very evident.
Thus, the group sh-m-r expresses the idea of "guarding," the group g-n-b that of "stealing," n-t-n that of "giving." Naturally these consonantal sequences are merely abstracted from the actual forms. The consonants are held together in different forms by characteristic vowels that vary according to the idea that it is desired to express. Prefixed and suffixed elements are also frequently used.
We may well suppose that the idea of wresting from the syllabary its secret of consonants and vowels, and giving to each consonantal sound a distinct sign, seemed a most cumbersome and embarrassing complication to the ancient scholars that is to say, after the time arrived when any one gave such an idea expression.
We use consonants where the bird uses none, as when we give the name cuckoo to a bird whose cry is really "ooh, ooh." Or else we put in the wrong consonants, which is shown by the fact that different nations assign different consonantal sounds to the same bird. We do not even agree on the vowel sounds.
By throwing off the vocal and consonantal terminations, and by the weakening or rejection of the vowels, this soft and melodious language was gradually changed in character, and became intolerably harsh and rugged.
Because each of these parts was often printed as a complete line in old texts, Beowulf has sometimes been called a poem of 6368 lines, although it has but 3184. A striking characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry is consonantal alliteration; that is, the repetition of the same consonant at the beginning of words in the same line: "Grendel gongan; Godes yrre baer." Grendel going; God's anger bare.
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