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Indian Languages in J\*ort7i dmerica, 335 



place these, and any other distinctive marks of this sort, under 

 the letters ; because the room above, as I have before observed 

 will be wanted for the marks of accent and quantity.* 



; 



DIPHTHONGS. 



The mode of writing the diphthongs, which would naturally 

 follow that of the vowels, will need but a few remarks 5 for, as 

 the diphthongs will be compounded of the several vowels whose 

 powers have already been under consideration, and those writers 



* Mr. Du Ponceau has suggested to me a method of indicating accent and 

 quantity, in a manner which is at once simple and ingenious. He proposes, that 

 long accented syllables should be marked with the grave accent^ and short ac- 

 cented ones with the acute. « Unaccented syllables," he adds, « need no mark, 

 being generally short." This method would be attended with no difficulty in 

 the application, were it not for the different ideas, which different persons may 

 affix to the terms long and short in this case. We say in English, for example, 

 that i in the word jpine is long, but that in jptn it is short. This, to an Italian, 

 French, or other foreign scholar, would be an absurdity j because it would be equi- 

 valent to saying, that the sound of our word aye and of our letter e (for so they 

 would pronounce i in pine and i in pin) are the long and short of tlie same vocal 

 sound ; when too, as our own grammarians begin to admit, the letter i in the for- 

 mer case is a diphthongy and in the latter, a voice?. Yet, absurd as this appears, we 

 see it carried into our methods of instruction in Latin and Greek, as well as in 

 English. No person, however, who has given the least attention to those foreign 



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of Europe, will suppose for a moment, that the distinction of long and short in 

 the ancient languages was like the distinction which we make in English, in 

 in the case of the i and some other vowels. But this is nut the place for discuss- 

 a subject, which will more properly belong to a communication on the Accents 

 of°he Greek language, which I hope to make to the Academy on a future oc- 



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