THE POLYNESIAN ALPHABET. 21 



becomes objectionable is to drop it entirely, as we find in Hawaii, 

 Samoa, and Tahiti as a consistent practice, and as we find it sporadi- 

 cally in many kindred languages. 



From this we deduce that these languages really have acquired the 

 use of the palate in general, have imperfectly established the duality 

 of its capacity as proved by this readiness of mutation and the wil- 

 lingness to sacrifice the mute. An examination of some of the con- 

 servative nooks of our own speech will serve to point the way to the 

 suggestion that this palatal was the first truly consonant difference to 

 be acquired as speech emerged from the cry. What saith the noble 

 red man? Let Deerslayer record the grunt of the Mingo, "hugh" 

 a vowel tone with a succeeding consonantal modulant, the palatal 

 spirant. From the better English of Fife and all the land about it 

 we cite hech in the common phrase ejaculation "hech sirs," again the 

 palatal spirant, surd where the other was sonant. Let a child rap 

 its risible olecranon, listen to the cry of ouch; again a vowel with a 

 final modulant, a palatal sibilant. These are words and yet no words; 

 they exist independent of parsing because they survive in a state of 

 nature, even though tagged with the interjection label for museum 

 display. They are but the first step advanced above the cry, the 

 earliest germ of speech. But to our age-long antiquity they and others 

 of their sort have preserved the vital difference between the cry of the 

 beast and the cry of man. The man has found the way to use his 

 palate, the very beginning of speech. These records of Polynesia show 

 that we are dealing with a man who can use his palate with whole confi- 

 dence in as yet but a single closure. 



Procul, o procul! far be it from us to seek to traverse the Jacobean 

 theology that "the tongue can no man tame." In philology we do 

 indeed recognize the taming of this member, we acknowledge it in 

 every reference to linguistics, in our most common conversation we 

 interchange with the utmost freedom speech and tongue, Whitsuntide 

 commemorates the miracle of the gift of tongues. In physical com- 

 parison with the palate we are struck with the reason. The tongue is 

 a flexible organ with great possibilities of finding its way to many parts 

 of the oral cavity, controlled by muscles which we soon learn to train 

 to our service and which we may govern with great precision. In 

 English we have familiarized ourselves, between the semivowel and 

 the mute, with a lingual closure of the vibrating air column in no less 

 than six distinct positions, covering the whole range of the consonant 

 possibilities to which this organ lends itself. In the closure which 

 yields the semivowel we find minimum deviations which yield us two 

 similar sounds, and we have another sort of duplication of sounds for 

 the sibilant, the spirant, and the mute. In our speech, then, the tongue 

 affords us ten distinct and always distinguishable sounds, so truly 

 producible and with such positive values that they are almost incapable 



