S58 Mr, Pickering on the Pronunciation 



ihree centuries ago by Erasmus Schmidtf in the Treatise I have 

 already mentioned. 



^^ As to the bleating of sheep (says he) whose cry is not hiy hi^ 

 £111 English hee^ hee'] but 6^, &e, [i. e, hay^ hay^'] it must be recoi- 

 lected, that in these and similar words; whose sound is an echo 

 to the sense, we do not express with precision the inarticulate 

 voice of brutes, which indeed itself is not always uniform. Thus 



the Greeks express the cry of a sheep by /3?, /3?, which others ex- 

 press by blii, bla \_blay, llay,'] and the Latins by ha, ha [bah, hah,'] 

 from halandi ; while others again express it by ma, ma, [\. e. 

 mah, mah] or md, ma, [i. e. may, may.] It cannot therefore be 

 proved by this, that the t} was exactly equivalent to the g or to the 

 si or to the a ; or that the ^ is exactly equivalent to the ^. In 

 like manner the Greeks expressed the harking of a dog by the verb 

 fixv^itv, whether it is to be pronounced ban or hav; but the Ger- 

 mans express the same thing by miff en, meffen, maffen, muff en, 

 and sometimes by hau, hau, hau ; thus usins; different vowels and 



different consonants. Shall we therefore say, that those letters 



■ » • 



all have the same power ? ^Aristophanes expresses a dog's bark- 

 ing by av, «y, that is, either au, au, or av, av ; for different dogs 

 sound it both ways. 



" The voice of the lark we express by lir, lir, whereas that 

 bird modulates its notes rather to the sound of other vowels than 

 the I; and the Germans themselves call it from its voice, 

 Shall we then arsue. that i and p arp. Mir cnmp ? 



lerche 



" The Latins have named the cuckow ciiculus, with the letter 

 li, while the Greeks, from the same sound, have called it xoxKvya : 

 Is the therefore to be pronounced like the m; for the note of the 

 cuckow has the sound of u more than of o ? The sound is. 



cue- 



