ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 109 



To pass from the one sound to the other was shown 

 to require a slight readjustment of the organs of the 

 mouth. 

 o. There is one sound of the English o which is clearly 

 synthetic, viz., that heard in the word whole; hut this 

 is the only word to which it applies, and uninstructed 

 people vary it through the entire range of sounds 

 from that of the u in hull to that of the o in hole. In 

 French, however, this is the prevailing sound of the 

 o and constitutes their short or unaccented o. It is 

 there highly synthetic, being pronounced quite differ- 

 ently in different sections of France, and in the same 

 section by different persons, and even in different 

 words by the same person, cultivated as well as un- 

 cultivated. Numerous examples were given by the 

 speaker. 



The disagreements and misconceptions among lexi- 

 cographers relative to this letter were shown to be 

 similar to those in the case of the a, all of whom, for 

 example, with the exception of Smart, give it the 

 same sound in the words dog, loss moss, cloth, &c, as 

 in the words not, pod, bog, Sec. The speaker main- 

 tained that the former sound is identical with that of 

 the an in fraud, or the aw in law. 



u Great misapprehension exists with regard to the long 

 sound of the u, whether to give it in any case the Con- 

 tinental sound represented by oo in English, or to 

 make it a diphthong as in blue {=blew) consisting of 

 the short sound of l prefixed to that sound. The 

 word nilr which Maj. Powell selects as the type of 

 the former pronunciation is much more frequently 

 given the latter, though this seems not to be sanc- 

 tioned. The short sound of the u as in pull was held 

 to be, like the short sound of i, a distinct sound capa- 

 ble of indefinite prolongation. 



