I9I5.] LYMAN— A PRACTICAL RATIONAL ALPHABET. 363 



in rule, i as in pique, e as in they; and, for the vowels, we must 

 abandon the hope of indicating by a separate character every one of 

 the infinite number of shades of sound, a few of which occur in 

 such series of vowels as in : hate, hale, hare, hairy, Harry, hal, hat. 

 The progress of enlightenment in thousands of years has led to far 

 greater nicety of distinction in vowel sounds than was common 

 formerly. But instead of five or six vowels that it was then found 

 worth, while to indicate by separate characters, it would now be 

 hardly practical to have distinct letters for more than eighteen or 

 twenty vowels and that number may be very practically arranged. 



A difificulty in bringing into general use any such somewhat 

 nicely adjusted system of indicating the sounds, especially the vowel 

 sounds, of any language is that the pronunciation of words is dif- 

 ferent in different regions and even among different families and 

 individuals of the same region ; nay, even with the same individual 

 according to varying emphasis in different connections, as to in 

 " going to Boston," and " to and fro " and the pronunciation some- 

 times varies through slackness or slovenliness of articulation or 

 enunciation, as in substituting a slight vowel sound for the con- 

 sonants y and w in such words as they and snow, or in dropping r 

 altogether after a vowel and before a consonant, as in arm. Hence 

 strict regard to phonetics would give the same word several dif- 

 ferent forms according to the taste or habits of different writers, 

 and stand seriously in the way of the uniformity of spelling that 

 would be extremely desirable for at least a literary language to be 

 used in common by a numerous people. 



As regards the vowels Professor Samuel Porter over forty-eight 

 years ago, in the American Journal of Science, September, 1866, 

 excellently classified the readily distinguishable vowel sounds of 

 English and other principal European languages, and arranged them 

 according to their physiological mode of formation, with a simple 

 illustration indicating nine different parts of the mouth where the 

 tongue is placed to give the form of cavity, which with the issuing 

 breath, will produce each vowel sound. So simple are the plan 

 and the illustration that they have been perfectly successful in in- 

 ducing very ignorant Orientals (in India and China) to indicate 

 thoroughly and simply the mode of formation of some of their most 



