234 The Study of Living Languages, [no. 4, utsw series, 



ters that represent in the Tamil language the sound of our N, or 

 some modification of it ; one, is precisely the sound of it, the tongue 

 "being placed in the same position as by us. This will be repre- 

 sented of course by our N. The second is the same in sound, though 

 represented by a different character, but it occurs only when pre- 

 ceding and combined with a certain other consonant, this may also 

 be represented by a simple English N, as the sound is the same. 

 The third has the sound of Ny in English and therefore should be 

 represented by those consonants, the sound is that of our 2V", in 

 New. The fourth is a sound unknown in English : it is pro- 

 nounced by the tongue being turned entirely back, so that the 

 under part of its tip touches the roof of the mouth. An N, sound- 

 ed with the tongue in this position is the sound required. This 

 therefore should be represented by an N, with a dot under it, the 

 dot or dots being the invariable mark of a sound quite strange to 

 an Englishman, so as to be the readiest warning to the student that 

 the tongue must be placed in a position which is new to him. This 

 is much preferable to the Native character itself, because there can 

 be no mistake about it without any effort of memory, whereas the 

 foreign character will always require the student to consider which 

 of the several sounds of A" it represents. 



It may be observed here, that, in general, probably in all cases, 

 the languages of semi-civilized people that are written, have an in- 

 variable sound for each character, so that there is no such difficul- 

 ty in representing them by the English characters as there would 

 be in representing English by some foreign character, on account 

 of the vocal sounds being represented in different words by differ- 

 ent vowels; as, Hat, yacht, many, all, fyc., and grief, leaf, seed f 

 previous, Marine, receive, and homoeopathy. In writing English 

 therefore in a foreign character, there would be no alternative but 

 to use a certain letter for each sound, however that sound is repre- 

 sented in English writing, and correct English spelling must be 

 learnt afterwards. But these difficulties do not exist in applying 

 the English character to represent the sounds of most of the writ- 

 ten languages of semi- civilized nations. 



2nd. Begin with a restricted vocabulary. In the first place, 



