great a variety of sounds, as the English. The most distinguished of those who have gone so far as to propose a reform are Bishop Wilkins, Sir William Jones, and Dr. Franklin; all of them eminently conspicuous for their strong common sense, and two of them for practical, every-day wisdom. Bishop Wilkins made a most elaborate analysis of the sounds of spoken language, and proposed two very distinct modes of representing them. His essay was received by the Royal Society and ordered to be printed, on the 13th of April, 1668. This analysis was unfortunately proposed as a part of An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, and therefore did not attract all the attention to which it was entitled.t

"Dr. Franklin did not apparently go so fully into the subject as Bishop Wilkins; fully enough, however, to show his conviction of the importance and feasibility of the reform. He proposed eight vowels, including h, and eighteen consonants. He invented a character for sh, one, ŋ, for ng, a modification of a for au, and separate characters for th whispered and th vocal. He recognized the natural division of consonants by pairs; but had not distinct signs for the long vowels, but expressed them by the short vowels doubled. He omitted c, j, q, w,x, and y; considering j as compounded of d and sh, ch as compounded of t and sh, and zh as compounded of z and sh. He evidently left the work incomplete.

"Sir William Jones, in a dissertation published more than fifty years ago, and prepared with that thoroughness of research for which

* The English language must be made up of the languages of the Celts, who occupied the island before the inroads of the Romans, and who have left dialects of their tongue among the Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and Gaelic; of the Latins of the times of the emperors; of the Danish and Norwegian invaders, many of whom made permanent settlements and spoke Scandinavian dialects; of the Saxon and Danish or Angle invaders of a later age, who formed the Saxon octarchy, speaking German languages; of the Normans of the Conquest, speaking the old French; of the modern French; of classical Latin, introduced with literature by learned men; of Greek, introduced in the same way, as the language of science; of Italian, as the language of the arts; and of words from various other sources. + Bishop Wilkins recognizes the binary division of consonants, and applies it to all the consonant-sounds, making twenty-six consonants, six letters of a middle nature, and five vowels, e, a, â, o, u. In his arrangement he begins with sounds formed in the throat, or "inmost palate," and comes out to those formed by the lips. He speaks of possible gutturals and lip sounds which do not occur in any language, and are not therefore to be provided with a symbol.

The following is his arrangement of the letters, which is here presented as

has been published in English. probably the earliest philosophical analysis of the sounds of our language which of Asiatic words, a new system of vowels and consonants, which were he was remarkable, proposed, for the purpose of representing the sounds

to be represented by those already existing, by the somewhat profuse use of compounds and diacritical marks.*

"The necessity of a reform is very apparent from an examination of our present alphabet, as used to express the sounds of our language.

"I. Our alphabet is inadequate; there being thirty-eight or forty sounds, and several combinations of sounds, to be expressed, and only twenty-six characters.

"II. It is redundant; three of these twenty-six, namely, k, q, and г, standing for sounds which are represented by other letters; and q being by itself without significance.

"III. It is uncertain, contradictory, and false; each of the vowelsigns representing several sounds,† namely: —

and each of these sounds being represented by other letters or combinations of letters, the first sound of

a, by 19 different combinations of letters.

See his Dissertation on the Orthography of Asiatic Words in Roman Letters, in the first volume of his works, edited by Lord Teignmouth, 1st ed., p. 175.

The sound of a is different in each two of the following words: imaging, mating, many, paring, father, fat, fall, want, dollar; of e, in the following: he, pretty, met, clerk, rendezvous, burden, blame; of i, in admiration, stir, sin, bind, business; of o, in women, nor, hop, work, sow, go, do, woman, compter; of u, in busy, bury, cur, but, unruly, pull, usage, persuade; of y, in pity, physic, myrrh, fly, yard. See Ellis's Plea for Phonotypy, p. 8.

As in the following words: of a, by a in mating, a-e in mate, a-ue in plague, ai in pain, aigh in straight, ao in gaol, au in gauging, au-e in gauge, ay in pray, aye in prayed, ea in great, ei in veil, eig in reign, eigh in weigh, eighe in weighed, ey in they, eye in conveyed, eyo in eyot, ez in rendezvous; of e, by a in Cæsar, e in be, e-e in complete, ea in each, ea-e in leave, ee in feet, eg in impregn, ei in conceit, ei-e in conceive, eo in people, ey in key, eye in keyed, i in albino, i-e in magazine, ia in parliament, ie in grief, ie-e in grieve, œ in fœtus, uay in

*

"There are fourteen simple vowel-sounds, and four diphthongs, i, oi, ou, u; in all eighteen, to be represented; and there are only six vowel-signs to represent them. They are distributed without any apparent order, or rather in defiance of all order, method, or principle.

"The representatives of the consonant-sounds are not so extravagant; there being only twenty-two or twenty-four consonant-sounds to be represented, and twenty, or rather seventeen, letters to represent them. The representation of these is, however, sufficiently fantastic; two of the perfectly simple consonants, c and t, being represented in ten different modes each.† On the whole, the thirty-six simple, and six or seven compound sounds, for which it is desirable to have characters, are represented in our language by three hundred and sixtyseven equivalents, an average of more than eight and one half to each sound, amongst which the inexperienced writer has to choose ; — and not a single sound of the English tongue has one uniform representative. The case is somewhat better for the reader. There are about two hundred letters or equivalents for letters in use, to represent the thirty-seven sounds of our language. Some of these have each a single value; but many of them have a considerable number. Among those of most common occurrence are the combinations ei, eo, ie, and ough, which have respectively seven, nine, eleven, and nine values.‡

quay, ui in mosquito, y in carry; of i, by ais-e in aisle, ei in neither, as often pronounced, eigh in height, ey in eying, eye in eye, i in bind, i-e in mine, ic in indict, ie in lie, ig in sign, igh in high, is-e in isle, ui in beguiling, ui-e in beguile, uy in buy, y in fly, ye in dye; of o, by au in hauteur, eau in beau, eo in yeoman, ew in sew, o in go, o-e in cove, oa in coal, oe in doe, oh in oh! ol in yolk, oo in brooch, ou in soul, ough in though, ow in know, owe in owe, wo in sword; of u, by eau in beauty, eo in feod, eu in feud, ew in few, ewe in ewe, hu in humor, ieu in lieu, iew in view, iewe in viewed, u in usage, u-e in use, ue in ague, ug in impugn, ugh in Hugh, ui in suit, yew in yew, you in you; of y, by e in courteous, i in onion, j in hallelujah, y in yard. — See Ellis's Plea, pp. 5-8.

* Namely: i (ee), as in feet; i, as in it; ɛ (a), as in mate ; e, as in met; æ, as

in mare; a, as in Sam; a, as in psalm; e, as in caught; o, as in cot; u, as in

cur; u, as in curry; o, as in bone; u, as in fool; and u, as in full.

Cin can, chasm, ache, back, lough, kill, walk, quack, quay, exception; tin debt, indict, sucked, sought, phthisical, ptarmigan, toe, Thomas, hatter, mezzotint. Ellis, p. 7.

The sounds of ei are different in every two of the words conceit, forfeit, veil, heifer, their, Leipsig, reimburse; of eo, in people, leopard, dungeon, yeoman, galleon, feod, Macleod, aureola, theology; of ie, in grief, pitied, friend, soldier, lie, medieval, conscientious, piety, crier, species, courier; of ough, in sought, though, through, plough, cough, hough, trough, hiccough, and tough.

The two hundred effective letters have only about five hundred and fifty values, an average of two and one half each. So that to guess what value to give to each letter when written is easier than to divine what symbols to choose to represent a sound uttered, in the proportion of two and one half to eight and one half, or of twenty-five to eighty-five.

"Of the fifty thousand words of our language which have been examined, not more than fifty, or one in a thousand, are pronounced as they are spelt, that is, if we take the first sound or name-sound of each letter as indicating its power. Hence the spelling of a word is no infallible guide to its pronunciation; and there is absolutely no way of indicating, by the alphabet now in use, what the pronunciation of a word should be.

"From the very anomalous and irregular nature of our written language follows the extreme difficulty of learning to read, it taking children not less than fifteen times as long as if each sound had one sign, and each sign one invariable sound. The difficulty is not simply what it would be if they had two hundred characters to learn. It is far greater. In regard to many of the letters and combinations, a child can never learn the sound. He can only learn that the sound is to be ascertained by authority, whenever the letter occurs. Take, for example, the first letter of the alphabet as occurring in the following

sentence.

3

666

1

Many, comparing this man with his father, fall into the mistake

that he wants little of being an image of him.'

"Here are nine different sounds of the a; and a child who had mastered them would be none the better prepared to give the sounds of a in any other word which should occur. He could at best guess that it had one of these nine sounds, and proceed to try them in succession, but each of the nine guesses would be wrong if the word were bread or heaven, or any other in which a is silent. Or take the letter e in the following sentence:

"Let her leave her burden at the rendezvous, and show the clerk her pretty tame mouse.'

"Here the letter has eight different sounds or powers, and the effect of learning it would be only to confuse the mind in reference to the sound of e in every word not contained in this sentence. Take one of the combinations of two letters, ai, for instance, in this sentence: -Captain Paine said he had a pair of plaids.' After learning the five sounds