88 Professor Joseph Wright [March 31,. 



of Buch languages, he then begins to learn the relations in which 

 they stand to each other, and to formulate the sound-laws which help 

 to establish their relationship. By studying ancient languages in 

 this manner philologists have been able to reconstruct more or less 

 accurately the parent language of the Indo-Germanic people. It is 

 only more or less accurately, because we possess but scanty records for 

 ascertaining very accurately the precise pronunciation of each of the 

 letters used in these languages. In other words, our philological 

 knowledge of ancient languages is for the most part based upon letter- 

 change instead of sound-chMigQ. 



There are many people who have acquired a considerable book- 

 knowledge of comparative philology, but who cannot be said to know 

 much about the real science of language, through their having failed 

 to learn to distinguish between letters and sounds. In a literary 

 language it often happens that the same letter is used to represent 

 several different sounds, as the letter o in literary English : wo7ne?i, 

 pot, north, no, bosom, do, love, tvorld. Or the same sound is repre- 

 sented by several different letters, as in literary English : he, feel, 

 dream, seize, people, thief, machine. 



It is true that literary English orthography is more defective in 

 this respect than almost any other modern literary language, but it 

 has been quoted as showing how important it is to learn to distinguish 

 between sounds and the symbols used to represent sounds. In short, 

 whoever studies the older periods of languages for philological pur- 

 poses cannot expect to acquire the p)recise pronunciation of the words, 

 owing to the deficiencies of the orthography in which they are 

 written. 



With the scientific study of modern dialects the case is entirely 

 different ; the investigator is not hampered with a traditional ortho- 

 graphy which is often many generations behind the spoken language. 

 He employs a strictly phonetic alphabet, in which the same symbol 

 always represents the same sound, and the same sound is always 

 represented by the same symbol. By setting to work in this manner 

 it is possible for him to gain a clearer insight into the life and 

 growth of language than by the study of any number of ancient 

 languages. 



Grammar. — Having said so much about the importance of dialect 

 studies, the lecturer then stated and illustrated a few of the many 

 phonological points upon which the dialects throw light in the history 

 and development of the literary language. In the accidence of the 

 dialects the points to which special attention was drawn, were the 

 formation of the possessive case of nouns and pronouns ; the verbal 

 endings ; and the great variety of ways in which the nominative case 

 of the personal pronouns is expressed in tlie dialects. It was shown 

 that many dialects have four forms to express /, and that these forms 

 are never mixed up syntactically. It was also shown that the dialects 

 have nine ways of expressing literary English this, twelve ways of ex- 



