OF ARTS AND SCIENCES. 23 



Mr. Emerson, in behalf of a committee appointed at a for- 

 mer meeting to consider the subjects of " the relation between 

 the Chinese language, and the languages of Northwestern Eu- 

 rope," and "of Phonotypy and Phonography," remarked, that 

 the committee were not prepared to offer any formal statement 

 on the first-named topic, further than to recommend that Mr. 

 S. P. Andrews, who had been present at nearly all the meet- 

 ings of the committee, be invited to present his views in a 

 memoir, to be laid before the Academy. Upon the subject of 

 PlLonotypy, Mr. Emerson made the following report. 



" Few subjects can present stronger claims to the attention of all per- 

 sons interested in the advancement and perfection of the arts of writ- 

 ing and printing, than Phonotypy and Phonography.* Phonotypy has 

 for its object a reform in the existing modes of representing language 

 by printed types. Phonography has the higher object of bringing into 

 use a mode of representing sounds by written characters, which shall 

 be more scientific, more exact, more easily acquired, and four or five 

 times more rapid, than any now in general use. 



" The necessity of a reform in the received mode of representing the 

 sounds of our language has occurred to very many pcrsons,t at differ- 

 ent times, within the last two or three hundred years. Indeed, this ne- 

 cessity must have been apparent to every philosophical observer who 

 has attentively considered the extreme inadequacy of the small and 

 veiy imperfect Phoenician alphabet, however modified by Greek and 

 Roman usage, when adopted to express the sounds of a language de- 

 rived from so many sources, and having so broad a compass and so 



• Phonotypy is the art of printing, Phonography of writing, according to 

 sound. 



t Sir John Cheke, appointed professor of Greek at Cambridge by Henry the 

 Eighth, in 1540, and knighted by Edward the Sixth, in 1551, made some at- 

 tempts to improve the orthography of the language. One of his devices was the 

 one so often proposed, of expressing long vowel-sounds by double vowels. His 

 friend and associate in the reform of the pronunciation of Greek, Sir Thomas 

 Smith, also proposed a reform in the orthography of English. Both these were 

 among the most learned men of their times. Many others have appeared, from 

 Mulcaster, in 1.582, to Rich, of Troy, New Hampshire, in 1844. 



