362 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



written in French, on } otn, in, tin. Also o } a, e, I would be pro- 

 nounced like the Portuguese o, a, e, i ; or om, a,m, em, im. The 

 difference between the French and English pronunciations of 

 ' long ' are that the French should be written Id and the English 

 Ion. ' would indicate palatalisation, a faint y sound, frequently 

 met with in the Slavic tongues of Europe and the Hamitic 

 languages of East Africa. I have already alluded to the 9 as the 

 symbol for the indeterminate vowel sounds, £, /, s, z, m, t, etc., 

 in so many Aryan tongues, in Chinese, in Bantu, Sanskrit, 

 Slavic, etc. It is often heard in English words in the unaccented 

 vowels, and in the terminal le. But I propose to leave it out of 

 English use as an unnecessary complication, either to write the 

 consonant without any vowel asfibl for 'feeble,' or to represent 

 it by the vowel it most nearly resembles, e, a, or &. 



Almost the only accent required in transcribing English, 

 French, and most European languages would be the acute 

 accent — ', which indicates the ordinary pitch of an accented 

 syllable, the rising tone of voice. The assumption in writing 

 all tongues will be that the customary pronunciation is to accent 

 the penultimate syllable in all words of more than one syllable. 

 It is only where these rules are departed from in accentuating 

 the first or last syllable that this accent would be required. 

 The other accents, of which I supply a good many forms in my 

 book, are for the most part only required in transcribing certain 

 West and Central African languages, Chinese, Burmese, and the 

 languages of Indo-China. The symbols of stressed and marked 

 unstressed vowels are the familiar - and v. I have already 

 referred to the equivalents of the clicks, and thus in this sketch 

 I have more or less covered the whole range of recognised 

 phonetics. It might, however, be convenient for the reader to 

 set out succinctly the full range of the phonetic alphabet I 

 propose, with its equivalents as nearly as possible in old- 

 fashioned English spelling. 

 Half-consonants : — 



' = apostrophe for an elided letter or indication of initial 

 utterance of vowel, like Arabic '. 



i = the hiatus or gasp between two letters, and French 

 ' aspirated ' h. 



e = the light aspirate (Greek '). 



? = the Arabic p. 



■" ~ nasalisation, 



