510 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



specialized and which sometimes require two letters, like ee or oo, to 

 represent a single sound, and in other cases express a diphthong or 

 double sound, such as a-i, by the single letter i. 



In general very few students of American languages employ pre- 

 cisely the same set of modifications of the Eoman alphabet, for the 

 reason that the great majority of them are working with different lan- 

 guages, whose sounds are unlike, so that precisely the same set of dia- 

 critical marks would be inappropriate and even inaccurate. The 

 foundation of the system is, however, universally accepted, and may be 

 roughly described as consisting of the vowel characters with their con- 

 tinental values, the consonantal characters with their English values, 

 plus diacritical and typographical modifications to meet particular re- 

 quirements. 



Number of Words 



There has been particularly great misapprehension as to what may 

 be called the extent or size of Indian languages — the range of their 

 vocabulary. This is not surprising in view of the fact that similar mis- 

 statements are still current as to the number of words actually used by 

 single individuals of civilized communities. It is true that no one, 

 not even the most learned and prolific writer, uses all the words of the 

 English language as they are found in an unabridged dictionary. All 

 of us understand a great many words which we habitually encounter in 

 reading and may even hear frequently spoken, but of which our speech 

 faculties for some reason have not made us master. In short, every 

 language, being the property and product of a community, possesses 

 more words than can ever be used by a single individual, the sum total 

 of whose ideas is necessarily much less than those of the whole body. 

 Added to this are a certain mental sluggishness which restricts most of 

 us to a greater or less degree, and the force of habit. Having spoken a 

 certain word a number of times, our brain becomes accustomed to it and 

 we are apt to employ it to the exclusion of its synonyms. 



The degree to which all this affects the speech of the normal man 

 has, however, been greatly exaggerated. Because there are, all told, 

 including technical terms, a hundred thousand or more words given in 

 our dictionaries, and because Shakespeare in all his writings used only 

 fifteen thousand different words, and Milton only six thousand, it has 

 been concluded that the average man, whose range of thought and 

 power of expression is immeasurably below that of Shakespeare and 

 Milton, must use an enormously smaller vocabulary. It has been stated 

 that the average English peasant goes through life without ever using 

 more than six or seven hundred words, that the vocabulary of Italian 

 grand opera is only about three hundred words, and that most of us do 

 well if we know a couple of thousand words. If such were the case it 

 would only be natural that the uncivilized Indian, whose life is so 



