280 ANALYTIC ORTHOGRAPHY. 
cher, or the characters on a tea-chest to a London grocer. He used them in a syllabic 
sense, varying their forms, and adding others to complete the number eighty-five. Here 
K became tso, and J coo, which latter is not so bad as making it zh or dzh. ‘The second 
and fifteenth word of the Lord’s Prayer in Cherokee, is, in French orthography—ca-l’Un- 
la-ti, (heaven,) but with German flat & and ¢, the last vowel as in English pit, accented, 
the a in art, and the second syllable exactly the French ?un (the one.) In Gouraud’s 
Transcript, No. 30, this word stands first in the third line; and the third from the end of 
the first line. The characters are read towards the right. 
84. Although the Cherokee alphabet is syllabic, beginning with a consonant, as (o, tlo, tso, 
a word may begin with a vowel, so that there are vowel characters, as D in arm, R in 
vein, T in field, &c., and this being the case, it may seem singular that the imventor did 
not fall upon a strictly alphabetic notation, seeing that, when writing W Ja, d le (lay,) r 
li (lee,) mu lu (loo,) he might have used wo, Db, or rp, for la; wr, &c., for lay; and wt, &c., 
for lee. 
85. But there is a great difficulty in getting an abstract idea of a consonant, as distinct 
from a syllable. The con-sonant ’P’ is nothing when alone, ’L’ is something. But pa 
and 7a are alike in termination, with an initial difference. Their notation must be ana- 
logous, and if syllabic, it can be appreciated. But if the initial and final effect of /a have 
each a character for the sounds which are so readily appreciated, pa must have the same 
a final, whilst it has nothing corresponding to 7 in the sense of an element which can be 
pronounced independently. The p’ of pa cannot be detached from a, it is a nullity with- 
out it, pa must therefore have a single character, and if pa, so also Ja. 
86. The same course of reasoning perhaps, causes Dr. Lepsius to assign single characters 
to the Hottentot clacks, which are made with a consonant position followed by a vowel po- 
sition of the organs;—to term m, 6, p, equally explosives; and in fact, m is whatever 6 
is, with nasality added, differing as a nasal vowel differs from a pure one. If then, 0 is 
an explosive, so is m, and if m is not explosive (and it is not) neither are 8, p. 
87. Those who term P an explosive, take the Tsi-la-ki view, mistaking two phenomena 
for one. P may be compared to a gate in a water course: if quite open, the water flows 
like a vowel sound, if let down nearly close, the flow may resemble that of / or th; if closed 
entirely, or closed or opened suddenly, the gate acts like P on the current of the voice 
or breath, or like B, should the water continue to gurgle and dam up behind the obstruc- 
tion; or like M, should the stream flow over the gate, or find a side passage; and when 
the stream issues suddenly, in an “explosive” manner, it is the current, not the gate or 
obstruction, which is explosive. 
