LANGUAGES OF THE AMERICAN INDIANS 5°9 



hire writing. In the highest development of this, in Mexico, the pic- 

 ture writing took on to a certain degree, but only partially, a phonetic 

 character. Pictures and symbols were sometimes interpreted as such, 

 and at other times read as sounds, almost exactly as in the rebuses with 

 which we amuse idle moments. Even then, however, the characters 

 usually represented whole words, or at best syllables, and as they did not 

 stand for individual sounds they were never true letters, and did not 

 form an alphabet properly speaking. 



All Indian philology accordingly rests on an oral learning of the 

 languages, and all writing of them has had to be in systems applied by 

 the investigator from other languages, or specially devised by him. 

 The former was the earlier and less satisfactory method. The Spaniard 

 used the Eoman alphabet with its Spanish values, the Englishman and 

 American the letters of English. TThere sounds were encountered 

 which are not present in these languages, they were usually either 

 omitted, or represented by a character whose customary value some- 

 what resembled the sound in question. 



More recent studies have generally been based upon a systematic 

 and scientific modification of the Eoman alphabet. In this certain 

 principles have now been universally accepted for half a century. The 

 most important of these are three. 



First, every character or letter must represent one and only one 

 sound. Second, each sound, whenever it occurs, must be denoted by 

 one and the same character. Third, single sounds must be written by 

 single letters, and vice versa, double letters are used only for combina- 

 tions of sounds. If these principles are strictly adhered to, it does not 

 much matter what characters or modifications of the Eoman letters are 

 employed, as long as the investigator is sufficiently conversant with the 

 language not to confuse those sounds which are somewhat similar; and 

 provided also that he furnishes a key or explanation giving the exact 

 phonetic value of every character employed by him. In the choice of 

 characters there are, however, certain preferences. English k and c, 

 for instance, are usually only two different ways of writing the identical 

 sound. In any scientific system of orthography k is preferable because 

 it has the same value in every European language that uses the Eoman 

 alphabet, as well as in Greek and the alphabets derived from it. The 

 letter c, however, stands for a great variety of different sounds. In 

 English and French it represents not only the sound of k, but of s, in 

 Spanish th, in German ts, and in Italian, in certain cases, ch. K, which 

 can not be misunderstood, is therefore always used in scientific systems. 



In the same way the five vowel characters are pronounced in almost 

 exactly the same way in the great majority of the languages of Europe. 

 Philology, therefore, uses these letters exclusively with their * con- 

 tinental " values rather than with the English sounds, which are quite 



