56 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



French is the foreign language which is most taught in 

 England. The consequence is that Englishmen suppose there 

 is no such thing as a phonetic language. If German, Italian, 

 and Spanish were more taught they would learn to understand 

 the subject. 



A few more peculiarities of English present themselves. 

 Cacao we spell cocoa, and pronounce coco. Bilbao used to he, 

 and often is still, spelt Bilboa. Kakatua we spell and pronounce 

 cockatoo. The name has nothing to do with a cock ; the bird 

 may be a hen. Kaka is the generic name for parrot among 

 many languages of the East, and kakatua is that of the par- 

 ticular family. 



Chinchona we spell cinchona, and generally pronounce as if it 

 were an Italian word. The name, if Spanish, was derived from 

 that of the Countess Chinchon, wife of the Captain-General of 

 Peru, and ch in Spanish is always soft, as it is generally in 

 English. There is, no doubt, the authority of Linnaeus for 

 cinchona, but he evidently made a mistake in this name. 



In the first attempt of a child to speak he says ba, and this 

 whether he is of English or any other race. When the child 

 grows up and goes to school we tell him that a = ae, and therefore 

 that ba ought to be bae. Luckily he knows better, he has found 

 out by instinct that ba is ba, and not bae. Afterwards he learns 

 to say papa and mamma, and notwithstanding the teachings of his 

 alphabet, he does not call them paepae and maemae. Advancing 

 in age he speaks of his father, not f aether ; although, strange to 

 say, the Scotch adopt the latter sound, contrary to their usual 

 habit of broadening the vowel a. 



In these days of aestheticism it is utterly impossible that the 

 orthography of the English language can remain long in its 

 present barbarous and almost ludicrous state, but the change to 

 a more correct system must be brought about by real linguists 

 a- id men of taste, men who thoroughly understand the Teutonic 

 languages — not only German, but Dutch, Flemish, and the 

 n Hied Scandinavian tongues. Until some result is arrived at 

 by men of the above-named qualifications, it would be much 

 better for both English and Americans to desist from any pre- 

 mature changes. 



It appears to me to be a misfortune that the Teutonic name 

 berg, mountain, should have been lost to the English Language, 

 except in iceberg, and the Romance names mount, mountain, sub- 

 stituted. Mount may generally be considered as a diminutive of 

 mountain, but we find it applied to mountains of the greatest 

 elevation. Thus we find in Mount Cook, Mount Everest, and 

 other mountains of the first class, the name mount filling the 

 position which it does in the Mounts Pleasant, or Brown, 

 or other small elevations in the vicinity of English towns. 

 Cookberg and Everestberg would be infinitely bitter. In New 



