364 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



We have the same in our own country. Look, for example, at 

 the widely different pronunciations of the letter r throughout 

 Great Britain and Ireland. The r in the speech of cultivated 

 people, especially in London and Oxford, at the great English 

 centres of education, and in Southern England generally, is com- 

 pletely elided in many words, and its elision has been carried 

 to such an extent in past decades that, in transcribing the 

 fashionable utterances of the 'sixties and 'seventies, it was often 

 represented by a w. We still meet with people in what is called 

 conventionally ' good society,' who say ' vewy ' or ' vey ' instead 

 of 'very,' and ' bwait' instead of ' bright.' In the Midlands the 

 r is pronounced wherever written, but often with a peculiar 

 cerebral or palatal growl, unmistakable to those who have 

 heard it, easy to imitate, and equivalent to the vocalised r of 

 Indian and Slavic speech. The r of Northumbria is burred or 

 pronounced with the velar palate, like French r in grasseye. 

 The r of Scotland and Ireland is more or less strongly trilled. 

 Then again, the t, which varies so much in Bantu Africa, varies 

 a good deal in Great Britain (in dialect), being sometimes pro- 

 nounced like d, sometimes as an actual hiatus, and even as an r. 

 Well : similarly, in Bantu and Sudanese Africa it is occasionally 

 difficult for a listener to determine whether the speaker is utter- 

 ing an r, a d, or a t. The / is sometimes strongly aspirated. 

 But I hold that as long as one writes it t when it is most like a t, 

 d when it is most like a d, and r when it most like an r, it will be 

 quite sufficiently discriminated, and I take the same line in 

 regard to other consonants ; a reasonable line, in view of the 

 mutability of human speech and the unreasonableness of expect- 

 ing any student of a foreign language to be able to speak that 

 language so as to give his hearers the impression that it is his 

 native tongue. Of course there are cases where a man or 

 woman has lived a long time in a foreign country and caught 

 up, like a child, the exact local pronunciation of the local speech. 

 But it is well-nigh impossible to teach any one such perfection 

 of imitation by book study ; and the multiplication of symbols 

 to indicate every conceivable grade of utterance will only 

 embarrass students and deter them from studies which appear 

 too difficult. The discrimination, as it is, between the dental 

 and the alveolar 5 and z, d and /, between the ordinary and the 

 Polish or Welsh /'s, the % and the %, the r and the r and r, has 

 been carried quite far enough. We wish to aim at an alphabet 



