220 



NATURE 



[July ,5, 1900 



PITMANESE PHONETICS. 

 Introduction to English, French, and German Phonetics, 

 with Reading Lessons and Exercises. By Laura 

 Soames. New Edition revised and edited by Wilhelm 

 Victor, Ph.D., M.A. Pp. xxvii + 178 + 89. (London : 

 Swan Sonnenschein and Co., Ltd., 1899.) 



THIS new edition of Miss Soames's work, which was 

 designed by the authoress to provide a convenient 

 method of teaching the pronunciation of the English, 

 French and German languages, will no doubt prove useful 

 to those teachers who believe in the advisability of teach- 

 ing pronunciation by means of Pitmanese. The book is 

 in no sense a scientific treatise on phonetics ; the portion 

 which deals with the production of the sounds of the 

 the three languages treated of is simply a very good and 

 useful exposition of the obvious : the main point of the 

 book is the elaboration for teaching purposes of a 

 phonetic alphabet which in many respects falls far short 

 of our ideal of what a phonetic alphabet should be, if 

 such a thing need be constructed for teaching or any other 

 purpose at all, except for the use of scientific students 

 of linguistic phenomena. E.(!^. the authoress uses "«" 

 to express the indetermmate vowel sound : now nobbdy 

 ever pronounced the as "dha " ; when it is not fully pro- 

 nounced "dhi," it is pronounced as a German would 

 pronounce "dho" : to write it "dha" is most mislead- 

 ing. Also, the final -er in English absolutely = the 

 German o ; crozier is pronounced " krozyo," though Miss 

 Soames would tell us to pronounce it " krozhar." She 

 writes gardener as " gadnar " : now if we pronounce 

 a true r m gardener at all, it is most certainly in the 

 first syllable (where it is usually sounded as a faint 

 guttural, a sort of feeble ayift), and not at the end of 

 the word : gardn'6 or ga>dnd. Generally speaking, Miss 

 Soames connives at the tendency of modern English to 

 weaken the r, and represents it as being far weaker than 

 It really is : in the same way the tendency to lose the 

 distinction between witch and luhich is in no way com- 

 bated by Miss Soames. She spells, most inconsistently, 

 " when," " which," instead of " hwen," " hwich " (hwic), 

 the proper phonetic spelling. Again, to teach a child to 

 pronounce Sassenach as " Sas/nec/^ " (Pt. i. p. 109), and 

 Lochinvar as '' Lo/^invar " (Pt. li. p. 64), is an extremely 

 slipshod proceeding, if it be not a mere solecism on the 

 part of the authoress. 



In the German phonetic spelling one or two weak 

 points may also be pointed out. The expression of hard 

 f>^ b y ;ir is a mistake : this appears to give the ordinary 

 symbol for ks in the Latin alphabet a value which 

 it does not possess : every learner cannot be expected 

 to know that the Greek X (Russian x), which does 

 possess the value of hard ch, has been trans- 

 ported into Miss Soames's phonetic alphabet to 

 express this value. It would have been better to 

 have used the small Greek type and have written 

 Nacht " Naxt," not " Naxt." We do not like the 

 adoption of 5 to represent final -g after front vowels and 

 consonants, as in Sieg, Berg, &c., either ; a wrong primary 

 impression is again given, and the fact is lost sight of 

 that it is an ^-sound, not a /&-sound, which is in question. 

 Why not use the symbol well-known in the translitera- 

 tion of Egyptian and Assyrian, h, for this sound, keeping 

 X for hard ch and final -g in Tag., &c. ? Sieg would 

 NO. I 60 1, VOL. 62] 



then be phonetically written " Zih." Miss Soames also 

 made 5 stand for the ch-%onnd. in manches ; this is in- 

 correct, ch here = "hy" ("manhyez"), a sound quite 

 ^istinct from the final -h of Sieg. 



The authoress appended a list of " Loan words used 

 in English," a large portion of which is made up of 

 words and phrases which are not loan words at all ; e.g. 

 ancien regime (I), abattoir (!!), and Aphrodite (111). On 

 the other hand, such words as abatis, accolade, aegis, or 

 aiguillette (which is presumably what the authoress 

 means by " aiguille"), are loan words. In this list some 

 mistakes of pronunciation occur, e.g. a fortiori should 

 be pronounced" on Miss Soames's system "ey fortio'rai," 

 not " foshio'rai," a vulgarism which no person with 

 the slightest intelligent knowledge of Latin would ever 

 thmk of using ; anacoluthoti should be pronounced 

 " aenako'lia'tho'n, sounding the o, not " tenako'lyii'than " ; 

 Canaan " Kana'an," not " Keynan " ; Koran " Karan," 

 not " Koran " ; and sheikh " sheg " (German " Scheech "), 

 not "shik," which is a terrible mispronunciation. On 

 p. 104, Eisteddfodd is given a superfluous final d ; and 

 on p. 99, the misprint Bacchus is noticeable. 



On the whole, while this work may be regarded as 

 generally useful for the purpose for which it is intended, 

 it is unluckily marred by a tendency to perpetuate many 

 incorrect and vulgar pronunciations, and even by several 

 mistakes, some of them merely slipshod, others due to 

 ignorance, which the reviser ought to have corrected. 



OUR BOOK SHELF. 



Psychologic der Naturvolker. By Dr. J. Schultze. Pp. 



xii + 392. (Leipzig : Veit and Co., 1900.) 

 In this study of primitive culture, Dr. Schultze passes 

 under review, from the standpoint of the psychologist, the 

 material which is the common heritage of the anthro- 

 pologists of to-day. Spite of the suspicions aroused by 

 a sub-title of nineteen words. Dr. Schultze's volume is an 

 unpretentious bit of work by a competent writer, whom 

 no phantasy of construction or love of paradox has led 

 astray from the patient use of authorities and the exer- 

 cise of a sober judgment. Dr. Schultze's first essays 

 in his subject were printed some thirty years ago. The 

 present contribution is self-contained, though for its 

 author it is but a part of a larger whole, preluded by 

 physiological psychology and a treatise on the psychical 

 life of plant and brute, and to be followed by a study of 

 childhood. It is naturally evolutionist in conception, 

 although the descriptive continuity which the author 

 maintains is accompanied by the refusal to allow that 

 the derivation of apperceptive consciousness from asso- 

 ciational, which irf the interests of a unitary view of 

 nature he might desiderate, has been adequately made 

 out. A feature of the book is the use made of English 

 authorities. Not only Spencer and Tylor, but McLennan 

 and Lubbock supply the writer with important doctrines, 

 e.g. in his account of the evolution of marriage. Mr. 

 Sutherland's " Origin and Growth of the Moral Instinct" 

 is recognised as having anticipated Dr. Schultze in much 

 which he would have been glad to have said, but, far 

 from being dismissed with a pcreat, is summarised in 

 an appendix. It is on fetichism and animism that Dr. 

 Schultze is most at home. Not that there is not much 

 else of interest on the alleged superiority of vision among 

 savages, on the concreteness of their philology, on the 

 relation of rhythm to melody, on the difference of the 

 sexes in regard to the sense of smell, on the evolution of 

 the sense for landscape, and the like. But to the topics 



