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Indian Languages in Mrth America, ggg 



NOTE ON THE VOWELS. 



In considering the several Utters by ivhich the vov.-el sounds are represented bof Ii 

 in our own and other anpages it vv-ill be perceived, that each of them may be £ 

 as represeatmg, not a single sound, but a series of sounds, which series will be more or 

 less extensive according to the genius of different languages ; and it will be fur er ob- 

 served that each series gradual? runs into the adjoi^iin| series (if we may so speak 

 by such slight and_ delicate modifications, that it is a matter of no small difficulFy in 

 many cases, to decide m what part of any one series we should drop the vowel char- 

 acter with which we begin, and take another to continue the sounds of the next merles- 

 m other words, it is not easy to determine, at what point one series ends and another 

 begins. For example j if we take the letter a, we may assume the sound which it has 

 m the wora father, as the middle point of a series, the whole of which, (beginning- witii 

 the broad a in fall and ending with the narrow or slender a mfate) we denote in'^En-^- 



lish by this one character, thus : fall — fAr fat— fate ** 



and these are all the sounds in this series, which philologists designate in our own lan- 

 guage b^ this one letter. But if we extend our view to other languages, we shall find 

 various intermediate sounds between the two extremes of tills same series j f(tr exam- 

 ple, between the sounds of our a in fail and in far, we find in the Frencli lan^ua"*, the 

 d in pale, male, &c. which can only be described, on paper, as a sound between ou°r two, 

 and which is seldom attended to by foreigners in speaking French. Now, if we should 

 minutely examine a number of languages, and should endeavour to arrange accurately 

 in one progression all the vowel sounds belonging to this series, we should doubtless 

 di^over in those languages many other slight modifications intervening between the 

 different members of our English series. As, however, we cannot accustom our ears 

 familiarly to distinguish, nor our organs of speech to utter with precision, all these 

 slightly dittenng sounds, so we need no distinctive characters to represent them to the 

 eye, but it will be sufficient in practice to have characters for the principal sounds (as 

 we may call them) in each series j just as in the prismatic series of colours, we content 

 ourselves with a few names to denote one principal shade of each colour, without ' 

 fruitlessly attempting to devise terms of theoretical nicety, to describe the innumera- 

 ble shades on either side of the principal one f rom wh ich we set out. 



If we now rpcur for a raomentTo the series above denoted by ^y we find on one side 

 of it a series which we denote bj the ietterl9,and on the other side, a series which we 

 denote by the letter £j in the former we begin with the sound of o in niorn, which might 

 be written with au or aw (or with a alone, if we had been accustomed to write this word 

 ■with that letter, as we do the word war) and then we proceed to the sound which it has 

 in more, till we arrive at that which it has in move / which point may be considered, 

 practically speaking, as forming the end of one series and the beginning of another, 

 jwhich is represented by the letter U; and these two contiguous extremes are sometimes 

 represented by o and sometimes by «, that is, our oo. If we now take the other side of the 

 series, represented as above by J, and set out from the sound which that letter has in the 



fate 



s' 



fate 



in tlie simple unequivocal sound of ee^ which toreign nations denote by the third vow- 

 el, u The following table ^vill perhaps make these remarks more iut*;lligible : 



'/ 



Series of the letter A : 



fAll fAte 



mOkn thEue 



'/ 



hOrn 



mOre 



thEre 



thEse 



mOvb 

 rUlej &c« 



marInEj &c. 



