64 THE SUBANU. 
intermediate closures, have not yet attained to precision in their use. 
The Subanu have not attained them at all. It is for that reason that 
the typical square of their consonant scheme is left open on that side. 
On the other side, the bounding line of the palatal series 1s as com- 
plete as in English, though in a slightly different sense. Of the two 
principal and generally occurring intermediate closures we have per- 
mitted disuse to overcome the spirants gh and kh; the latter we seem to 
have rejected early in our speech history and to have selected the sonant 
in preference over the surd; the former yet remains present to the eye 
and a torment to our conservative orthography, as in ‘“‘neighbor,’’ which 
also exhibits the passage from the kh of nachbar to the sonant, yet in 
sound it has vanished. The Subanu have attained to the use of the pal- 
atal spirant in both its phases; our palatal sibilants, zh and sh, have not 
yet been acquired. 
In the lingual series the Subanu has established the limiting clos- 
ures—at the hither end the semivowel in its double phase, the nasal; at 
the distal end the mute in its two phases; in the intermediate space we 
employ with beautiful accuracy the spirant and the sibilant, each in its 
two phases; the Subanu has acquired no more than a single one of these 
four possible consonants, the surd lingual sibilant s. 
There remains now for consideration the aspiration, an activity of 
speech so anomalous that in our diagram we set it to one side and on the 
margin, because it does not seem possible to associate it with any of the 
speech-organs. It is present in Subanu, but its use appears scanty in 
this vocabulary material; it is frequently dropped from situations where 
the intimately allied Visayan shows that it might be employed except 
for dialectic preference. ‘There is really in this material so little bearing 
upon its phonetic place that I have been content to make but a single 
entry upon the diagram. In other studies based upon richer material I 
have shown that there is an aspiration proximate to the palate, an aspi- 
ration proximate to the tongue, and an aspiration proximate to the lips. 
In speech sounds are employed singly or in combination. Thus we 
arrive at the need to study the syllable as a secondary unit of the spoken 
word. ‘The sounds which may be employed singly are the vowels; their 
number is but small. Each vowel may enter into composition with one 
or more consonants in two positions, in either one or both. Conven- 
lence in study has led to the classification of these secondary units as 
open or closed syllables, according as the vowel sound is final or is closed 
by consonant modulation. ‘There is more than convenience in this 
classification; languages fall into two primordial classes according as 
the syllables are of open or closed type. We then have the following 
varieties of syllables, two for each type: open syllables, vowel alone, 
consonant—vowel ; closed syllables, vowel—consonant, consonant—vowel-— 
consonant. The Subanu exhibits all four varieties of syllables; it is 
therefore a language of the closed type. ‘To such an extent does the 
