PHILOLOGY. 



517 



or written signs, but must be acquired by instruction, 

 exercise, and practice, coupled with that natural 

 disposition, without which there can be neither a 

 musician nor an orator. But if the sounds, which 

 are the elements of speech, are not divisible in the 

 same manner as those from which music proceeds, 

 they are, nevertheless, susceptible of discrimination 

 from each other, and may be divided into classes, 

 though not into intervals. A much greater number 

 of organs concurs in their production than in that of 

 the musical tones. The head, the breast, the lungs, 

 the throat, the lips, the tongue, the palate, the teeth, 

 and even the nose, all lend their aid to the formation 

 of the wonderful mechanism of language. M. Court 

 de Gebelin has described anatomically the manner in 

 which the different sounds are produced, in his His- 

 toire naturelle de la Parole, to which we refer our 

 readers. In the analysis of these sounds, and in the 

 means of representing them by visible signs, consists 

 the principal part of the branch of science which we 

 call phonology. This seems easy at first view, par- 

 ticularly when we consider the small number of ele- 

 mentary signs contained in our alphabets, which are, 

 in general, sufficient for practical use in the languages 

 to which they are applied, and to which they belong; 

 but, if we extend our prospect, and attempt to de- 

 scribe all the elementary sounds which the human 

 organs may, and, in fact, do utter, for the purpose of 

 oral communication in the different countries of the 

 world, we find ourselves at once surrounded with 

 difficulties. There is no common standard for the 

 pronunciation of any given vowel or consonant. 

 Their mode of utterance varies in different countries, 

 so that it can hardly be recognised from one to the 

 other. Take, for instance, the vowel a, not its acute 

 sound in the English word grace, but what is com- 

 monly called the French and Italian a. The first 

 thing that will strike an experienced phonologist is, 

 that this sound does not at all exist in the English 

 language. It is not the a in call that is too broad ; 

 not the a in father that is too acute, and it rather 

 approximates to the French broad e in tcte, as arti- 

 culated in solemn discourse, and on the stage. If 

 this should be still doubted, we will ask an English- 

 man to pronounce the French word barbier. He will 

 at once give to the a the long and acute sound of a 

 in the English word barber. It has been observed 

 that the pronunciation of this letter a is the Shibbo- 

 leth by which an Englishman is soonest detected in 

 speaking the French language, and teachers will 

 acknowledge that they find it most difficult to make 

 their scholars pronounce it properly. As to conso- 

 nants, similar difficulties exist. The English th (the 

 delta and theta of the modern Greeks) is seldom 

 correctly pronounced by those who have not these 

 sounds in their native language. The English sh and 

 the French ch have by no means the same sound. 

 There are nations who confound the b and the v, the 

 b and the p, the d and the t, and cannot discriminate 

 the one from the other. The Mohawks pronounce 

 the k so nearly like the sound of g hard, that it 

 requires a very nice ear to distinguish which of the 

 two it is. The Rev. Mr Williams, a native Mohawk 

 of mixed blood, after much hesitation, at last deter- 

 mined in favour of k. Before that time, lx>th letters 

 had been indifferently used in their alphabet to 

 represent it. It has long been a subject of contro- 

 versy whether the ancient Greeks pronounced the /3 

 like our b or v. It seems most probable that it re- 

 presented a sound partaking of both. The Spaniards 

 use these two letters indifferently. The fact is, that 

 the sounds uttered by the human voice, particularly 

 the vowel sounds, slide into each other by imper- 

 ceptible shades, which may be divided ad infinitum, 

 Hid the number of their divisions is only limited by 



the power of the ear to discriminate them. Thus 

 from a to o there are a great number of intermediate 

 sounds. The monosyllable./*/, pronounced by an 

 elegant woman of Berlin or Dresden, has the small 

 short sound of the French a in ptipft : a Suabian 

 peasant, on the contrary, will say jn, with the pro- 

 longed sound of our broadest o. It is probably from 

 this analogy that the double aa in the Danish lan- 

 guage has the sound of o ; and the same sound is ex- 

 pressed in Swedish by a. Proceeding from the grave 

 to the acute, the sound a falls into the French e 

 open, then to the acute a, as in grace, face, and, be- 

 coming still more acute, it is heard as the English ec, 

 or the French and Italian i. We have shown how 

 the consonants are often confounded with each other. 

 All this proceeds from the various motion, the greater 

 or lesser aperture or pressure of the organs employed 

 in speech, and, for want of a common standard, or, 

 if we may so express ourselves, diapason, it is im- 

 possible to convey an idea of those differences in 

 sounds, and their nice shades and gradations, other- 

 wise than by a direct appeal to the ear. Nothing 

 more can be obtained by a reference to sounds that 

 are known than an imperfect approximation ; whence 

 it happens that the pronunciation of a foreign lan- 

 guage, though ever so nearly connected with our 

 own, can never be learned from books, and when, at 

 a certain age, the organs of speech have lost that 

 flexibility which they possess only in early youth, 

 even the practical aid of a master is often found in- 

 sufficient. 



When we pass from sounds that are known, that 

 is, those to which our ears have become more or less 

 accustomed, from their existing in languages which 

 we have at least heard spoken, or from their bearing 

 a great analogy to those of our idiom, and proceed to 

 those which our ears have never heard, and which 

 bear no analogy to those that we know, the difficulty 

 of conveying those sounds to the mental ear by 

 means of written signs, becomes insuperable. Such 

 are the whistled w of the Delawares, the c of the 

 Peruvians and Othomts, which the Hispano-American 

 grammarians call castannuelas, which we cannot de- 

 scribe otherwise than by saying that it is something 

 like our k, pronounced from the throat only, and 

 imitating the noise of a monkey cracking nuts ; the 

 yerwe of the Russians (br), something like our sound 

 we, pronounced very short, and struck by the pre- 

 ceding consonant in a manner which cannot be de- 

 scribed ; the Polish crossed t, the- guttural sound said 

 to be peculiar to the Hottentots. These and many 

 others that could be mentioned, we have no means 

 of making known, except through the medium of the 

 physical ear. To those who never heard them, no 

 written signs can convey a correct idea of their ut- 

 terance. The degrees of the musical scale are con- 

 veyed from one country to another by means of in- 

 struments, violins, flutes, &c., from which an accurate 

 idea of them may be every where obtained. If it 

 were possible to invent a mechanism that should, in 

 the same manner, convey to the ear the various 

 sounds produced by the organs of speech, it would 

 be an immense advantage to phonology. We believe 

 that it would be possible to effect it, if phonology pos- 

 sessed the same attraction as music ; but the Vaucan- 

 sons of the age will hardly undertake it for this dry sci- 

 ence. It appears impossible to us, at least at present, 

 to make a complete and accurate general alphabet of 

 all the sounds existing in the different languages of the 

 earth : all we can expect to arrive at is some kind of 

 approximation, by means of which philologists may 

 more easily coininunicnte and convey to each other 

 the idea of each particular sound as nearly as possi- 

 ble ; for it must be acknowledged that, particularly 

 as relates to barbarous (as they are called) anduewlj 



