Volapiik. | 6 (Jan, 6, 
0, u, pronounced as in Italian, and all impure or modified vowel sounds, 
as the German 4, 6, ii, the French wu, the English u (as in use), 0 (as in 
not) and the neutral vowel wu (in but) should be discarded. All the 
Aryan tongues named possess the five pure vowels, but not all the im- 
pure and neutral vowels. 
In the consonantal scheme, all gutturals, aspirates, lisps and nasals 
should be omitted. Thus, the German ch, soft or hard, the Spanish z, 
the English h and th, the French n ; and likewise all double consonan- 
tal sounds, like the Spanish 7%, ll, rr, the German kn, pf, the Russian 
schisch, the Italian zz, cc, etc., Should find no place. Of all the Aryan 
languages the pure Castilian Spanish comes the nearest to such an 
ideal phoneticism, and it approaches very near indeed, a few conso- 
nantal heresies and the accent being its only drawbacks. 
In the written alphabet of such a language there should be, and there 
would be no oceasion for, any diacritical marks whatever. The so-called 
Latin or Roman handwriting and type should be employed, but with 
the omission of every sign which would require the writer to take his 
pen from the paper in the middle of a word, or else return to it in order 
to complete it. Hence the 7 should have no dot (as is the case in Ger- 
man) nor the j, and the t should not be crossed. No accents should be 
needed and no apostrophes. 
The sounds of the language should not only be easy; they should 
also be fairly agreeable to the ear, and combinations should be sedu- 
lously avoided which in any of the leading tongues have indecorous or 
degrading associations. : 
srevity is of great importance, and each word should be reduced to 
its simplest discriminative sound, consistent with sonorousness and 
lucidity. 
Il. Lexicography.—The vocabulary of the universal language should 
be based primarily on the vocabulary which is common to the leading 
Aryan tongues. There are 1500 words in German which are almost or 
quite the same in English; there are more than this number common 
to English, French, Italian and Spanish. A selection should be made 
from these similar or identical word-forms as the foundation of the 
lexicon. At least a thousand words in common use will be found to 
be the same in all these languages, when we allow for the operation of 
simple and well-known phonetic laws. Let the learner be taught these 
laws and he will at once know a good share of all the more usual terms 
of daily intercourse in this new language, and he will pronounce them 
correctly without a teacher, because it will contain no sound which is 
strange to his ears, and each word would be spelled as it is pronounced. 
This existing common property of words, once assorted and presented 
in the orthography above set forth, would form one element of the lexi- 
con; another will be those words obtained from an international 
