22 



EASTER ISLAND. 



of being muffled by the blanket of coryza, which plays such havoc 

 with the rest of the consonants. These ten sounds are but one short 

 of being exactly half of the number of our consonants, a good index 

 of the amount of speech work done by this small member. A better 

 index is shown in a computation of relative frequency of employment 

 of the sounds in English, a computation which differs from the common 

 table of letter frequency. In preparing this I counted sound by sound 

 in a continuous passage of Thomas Hardy's prose until I had reckoned 

 exactly 1,000 occurrences of the most frequent vowel, i of the Italian 

 sound. These are the resulting figures: 



a 722 



e 45i 



o 233 



1 I.OOO 



u 632 



For purposes of comparison I subjoin a similar table computed for 

 modern Samoan from a continuous passage of the Scriptures (Fa'ata'oto 

 xiii, xiv), selected because of its freedom from introduced words. 



i 381 



e 485 



ng 91 



(k) 385 



a i.ooo 



I 463 

 n 131 

 s 46 



t 228 



o 450 



u 224 



m 150 



v 52 

 f 116 

 p 60 



We may obtain a better comparison by presenting these particulars 

 in their natural groups in the accompanying table : 



Table i. 



We may make yet another generalization, the relation per cent 

 which the three series of consonants bear to the total number of sounds 

 which yield 1,000 utterances of the dominant vowel. 



