te: 
THE CANADIAN JOURNAL. 
“NEW SERIES. 
No. XLVIT.—SEPTEMBER, 1863. 
PHONETIC ANOMALIES OBSERVED IN SOME MODERN 
FORMS OF ANCIENT PROPER NAMES. 
BY THE BEV. DR. SCADDING. 
(Read before the Oanadian Institute, April 18, 1863.) 
Ir is generally allowed that the usual English mode of pronouncing 
the ancient languages of Italy and Greece is very far from being 
correct. However thoroughly our learned men may have entered 
into the genius and grammar of those tongues, the sounds which 
they reproduce when they come to express audibly with their lips 
what their eyes gather up from the written or printed page of 
Tacitus or Thucydides, are, probably, as like the sounds originally 
intended to be conveyed by the characters before them, as those 
uttered by the English proof-reader’s assistant are, who, in igno- 
rance of Parisian phonetic niceties, delivers aloud a chance sentence 
in French. 
Tn regard to the vowel-sounds it would almost seem as if at the 
outset, when our forefathers, 
“Meuton or Kelt, or whatever we be,” 
were first made acquainted with alphabetical writing, “some one had 
blundered ;” as if the primitive learner had confounded a with e, and 
4 with e¢ or ai; and then that the mistakes of childhood, as is some« 
Vou. VIII. z 
