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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
We may remark, however, that the author adopts that abominable so- 
called phonetic system of spelling, which, thanks to the good sense of the 
Government authorities, did not succeed in establishing itself as the state rule 
of orthography in Germany. It is melancholy to see men of cultivation giving 
in to a system of spelling which destroys the affiliation of the words in their 
language, and this, especially in the case of German, with no advantage 
that can be considered in any way to make up for the loss. Thus, in Italian 
and Danish, we are accustomed to see /used in place of ph, but this is no in- 
novation, and why people who are accustomed to the use of the ph should 
discontinue it is rather hard to see. In the present book we find our old 
friends the Phoenicians transmogrified into ‘ Fonizier,’ a word at which we 
really have to look twice before understanding what it means. But the 
letter to which these German phoneticists seem to be most inimical is the 
letter h , not from any cockney-like objection to aspirating it, but because it 
occurs in many words where it has not the effect of an aspirate. One would 
think that Germany had found itself to be like the country described by 
Hood in one of his children’s tales, ‘ a land of Toomeniaitches.’ Thus th is 
everywhere converted into t, and we get such elegant words as Teil and Tat, 
and from the latter we get Tater, which has a homely sound ; and further, 
the h following a vowel is dropped, so that instead of Jahr, mehr , sehr, ohne , 
wohl, and zahlen, we get Jar , mer, ser, o?ie, wol, and zalen. With regard to 
’these last words we can only say that the German who would make no dif- 
ference in pronouncing them when spelt in these different ways, has a very 
imperfect idea of the pronunciation of his own language ; and if there ought 
to be a difference, what becomes of the phonetic spelling P 
