24 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



great a variety of sounds, as the English.* The most distinguished of 

 those who have gone so far as to propose a reform are Bishop Wilkins, 

 Sir William Jones, and Dr. Franklin ; all of them eminently conspicu- 

 ous for their strong common sense, and two of them for practical, 

 every-day wisdom. Bishop Wilkins made a most elaborate analysis of 

 the sounds of spoken language, and proposed two very distinct modes 

 of representing them. His essay was received by the Royal Society 

 and ordered to be printed, on the 13th of April, 1668. This analysis 

 was unfortunately proposed as a part of An Essay towards a Real 

 Character and a Philosophical Language, and therefore did not at- 

 tract all the attention to which it was entitled.! 



"Dr. Franklin did not apparently go so fully into the subject as Bish- 

 op Wilkins ; fully enough, however, to show his conviction of the im- 

 portance and feasibility of the reform. He proposed eight vowels, in- 

 cluding h, and eighteen consonants. He invented a character for sh, 

 one, ij, for ng, a modification of a for au, and separate characters for 

 th whispered and th vocal. He recognized the natural division of con- 

 sonants by pairs ; but had not distinct signs for the long vowels, but 

 expressed them by the short vowels doubled. He omitted c, 7, q, w,x, 

 and y ; considering j as compounded of d and sh, ch as compounded 

 of t and sh, and zh as compounded of z and sh. He evidently left the 

 work incomplete. 



" Sir William Jones, in a dissertation published more than fifty 

 years ago, and prepared with that thoroughness of research for which 



* The English language must be made up of the languages of the Celts, who 

 occupied the island before the inroads of the Romans, and who have left dialects 

 of their tongue among the Welsh, Cornish, Irish, and Gaelic ; of the Latins of 

 the limes of the emperors ; of the Danish and Norwegian invaders, many of whom 

 made permanent settlements and spoke Scandinavian dialects ; of the Saxon and 

 Danish or Angle invaders of a later age, who formed the Saxon octarchy, speak- 

 ing German languages ; of the Normans of the Conquest, speaking the old 

 French; of the modern French; of classical Latin, introduced with literature by 

 learned men ; of Greek, introduced in the same way, as the language of science ; 

 of Italian, as the language of the arts ; and of words from various other sources. 



t Bishop Wilkins recognizes the binary division of consonants, and applies it 

 to all the consonant-sounds, making twenty-six consonants, six letters of a middle 

 nature, and five vowels, e, a, d, 0, u. In his arrangement he begins with sounds 

 formed in the throat, or " inmost palate," and comes out to those formed by the 

 lips. He speaks of possible gutturals and lip sounds which do not occur in any 

 language, and are not therefore to be provided with a symbol. 



The following is his arrangement of the letters, which is here presented as 



