172 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



ed by the Latin, Italian, and German double character z ; and here 

 Mr. Ellis might have consulted the appearance of the English page 

 with advantage, in using a pointed s ; the sound in question being 

 scarcely ever represented by z in English and French. In Pelham's 

 notation, s is used with its sonant power, that in hiss having a point- 

 ed s, 



" Mr. Ellis's ethnical alphabet, whilst it properly separates x into cs, 

 represents the double sound of the English tsh by a single character, 

 namely, c with a tail ; and the reasoning employed to excuse this 

 ought to have required the English dzh to be represented by o with 

 the same tail, to make the deduced characters correspond with their 

 originals c, g (cay, gay), which, by a great concession on the part of 

 Mr, Ellis, he uses in their classical sense. But whilst the character 

 for tshi is etymological* that for its sonant dzhi is merely English^ 

 being j, a character which, on the correct principle of making c cay, 

 should have had its Latin, Italian (as in jeri), German, Polish, &c. 

 power, as in the initial of year (German jahr), the character having 

 been made for this sound. t In Spanish, j^ stands for the Greek chi, 

 and in Cherokee for gu (in good), constituting less of a corruption 

 than to call it dzhi or zhi, because it still represents a member of the 

 guttural contact. But if tshi must have a character because derived 

 from cay, so must the German ts, t alone, French ^, sh, t when fol- 

 lowed by sad, &c., with their sonants, forming an aggregate of about 

 twenty useless characters, rendered necessary by Mr. Ellis's conces- 

 sion to etymological orthography, which in other points he ostensibly 

 opposes. Moreover, who shall decide when tshi is derived from c or 

 g, or ng, or ch, or j, or from neither, especially in foreign langua- 

 ges ? — and to use it in other cases (to write China for example) de- 

 stroys its supposed etymological value. A statement of the fact, and 



* As in the change from hrig to bridge, and kist (Latin cista) to chist, or the 

 literary corruption chest. 



t In the English alphabet of Professor Reynolds, published in 1845, J has its 

 proper power, t/oA-c being spelt like its original jok. E and s are used properly, 

 and fotcl is spelt faul. English written in this alphabet, or in that of Jones, can 

 be read by a reader of ordinary English as readily as Mr. Ellis's transcription ; 

 and a person taught with either, or with Dr. Comstock's, can subsequently learn 

 heterography quite as easily as through Ellis's system. 



X There is a complete parallelism between the Spanish use of J as ch, and the 

 German use of the Latin V (English w) as /. 



