Phonetic alphabet

“ Chinese is the official script of Corea, but the lower classes use a phonetic alphabet which, in the judgment of some authorities, is derived from a cursive form of the Nâgari script of India, having, so it is thought, been introduced by Buddhist teachers. Both past and present times afford striking examples of the influence of religion in the diffusion of alphabets, missionaries obviously making use of their own alphabet in the translation of their sacred books into the language of their converts. ”

“ Our alphabet is radically bad, having a superfluity of symbols for certain simple sounds, and no single symbols for other elements of speech. Most of our vowels are sounded a variety of different ways, the most common ways being inconsistent with the sounds agreed upon in other modern languages. Spelling reformers have been agitating this matter for fifty years, but we are apparently no more ready to reform our alphabet now than when they began. Some of them, accepting the existence of an unchangeable alphabet, have persistently advocated the adoption of a strictly phonetic system of spelling ”

“ In the process of phonetic change, whose tendency is always toward the increase of the spoken alphabet, the filling up of the system of articulated sounds by the distinction of slighter and more nicely differentiated shades of articulation, our spoken alphabet has very notably outgrown the limits of our written alphabet. ”

“ For when language is known only as spoken language, there is no need to fragment the sound—flow into isolated "letters". The mind is conscious only of units which do possess meaning——whole words and sequences of words. It is as a result of phonetic literacy that language is thought of as consisting of letters of the alphabet——i.e. intrinsically meaningless units. Khlebnikov, in denying the meaninglessness of consonants, was repudiating an important characteristic of phonetic literacy which McLuhan describes as follows:
The phonetic alphabet is a unique technology. ”

“ That is to suit the Alphabet to the Utterances of the Language.’ He announces that ‘care is taken to give every character one power of its own, in which no other character is allowed to interfere.’ He pointed out the defects and inconsistencies of our ordinary orthography, and sought by means of a simpler alphabet and a new vowel scale to place the spelling of the language on a strictly phonetic basis. ”

“ The introduction of new types, although it made possible the use of a scientifically perfect alphabet, proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to the general adoption of phonetic printing, and after experiments with new types extending over forty years Pitman adopted, in 1883, with some additions, the rules recommended by the American Spelling Reform Association and the American Philological Society in order to secure the phonetic representation of the language without the addition of new letters to the alphabet. ”

“ Of vowels and consonants capable of being employed in language, man is able to pronounce and distinguish an 171enormous variety. But this great stock of possible sounds is nowhere brought into use altogether. Each language or dialect of the world is found in practice to select a limited series of definite vowels and consonants, keeping with tolerable exactness to each, and thus choosing what we may call its phonetic alphabet. ”

“ Phoenicians themselves got their alphabet.
III.—It can be proved that before the final division and classification of languages, there existed two languages in every nation: (a) the profane or popular language of the masses; (b) the sacerdotal or secret language of the initiates of the temples and mysteries—the latter being one and universal. Or, in other, words, every great people had, like the Egyptians, its Demotic and its Hieratic writing and language, which had resulted first in a pictorial writing or the hieroglyphics, and later on in a phonetic alphabet. ”

“ The oral word therefore bears no more necessary relation to the phonetic organs than to the auditory; it is no more closely related to the physical than to the physiological process; and the image or the soul of a word is as indispensable, surely, to the psychic phenomenon as to any other link in the chain.
The spoken word has no more primary connection with the alphabet than with the ideograph. The alphabet relatively is a late invention of signs with which to suggest word-sounds in writing. The alphabet performs its function principally through the sight. ”

“ Most of the consonants, if pronounced at all, have in all cases one and the same sound. Any possible acquisition of the speech in the term of a man’s natural life has depended upon the fact that these members of the alphabet are in general really phonetic. Their faithfulness to their legitimate sounds stands in sharpest contrast to the almost hopeless disorganization which has overtaken the vowels. ”

“ Lhuyd, (1707) . used χ for ch, λ for ll, and ꝺ for dd. The last has survived in the form ẟ in ordinary handwriting, but manuscript ẟ is printed dd.
§ 8. The orthography of Mn. W. is almost purely phonetic: each letter of the alphabet has one standard sound, except y which has two. It will therefore be convenient to give the values of the letters in the modern alphabet, and then, rising the modern characters to represent the sounds of the language, to show in detail how each sound was written in earlier periods, noting any changes which have taken place in the sounds themselves. ”

“ But in this essay I am contemplating man as he was before hundreds of generations of speaking ancestors had evolved such cerebral powers.
I begin with some observations on the phonetic elements. These are no other than what we call the alphabet, the simple sounds which combined together make up the words of a language. In all European tongues, the mere letters of the alphabet, by themselves, have no meaning and convey no idea; furthermore, their value in a word is fixed; and, thirdly, arranged in a word, they are sufficient to convey its sound and sense to one acquainted with their values. ”

“ We may fairly connect with the close uniformity of men’s organs of speech all over the world, the general similarity which prevails in the phonetic systems of the most different languages, and which gives us the power of roughly writing down so large a proportion of any one language by means of an alphabet intended for any other. ”

“ The endeavour sometimes made to reduce the Parent-Aryan alphabet to a small number of simple and easily pronounced consonants, is founded on the fallacy that the results of a phonetic analysis of the words we utter and a reduction of the sounds they contain into their leading types, is identical with the primitive alphabet of the Aryan race. ”

“ The latter are believed to have made no nearer advance towards writing than the tying of tally-knots on strings, and the Mexicans, while they had invented paper, wrote down their ideas, save in the cases of a few phonetic signs, as children would, by means [Pg 76] of pictures; but the Mayas, like the Egyptians, had proceeded beyond pictures to hieroglyphs, where symbols, more or less arbitrary, stand for words or syllables, and the mind prepares itself to invent an alphabet." (Mercer's Hill Caves of Yucatan, p. 73.) ”

“ There are, moreover, [233] cases in which there is no indication in writing of single sounds, and even syllables, which are actually pronounced; and there is at least one case of a word being written as if it began with a vowel, while it really begins with a consonant.
One of the chief reasons for this state of affairs is the attempt which has been made to represent an exceedingly numerous and varied series of sounds with a meagre alphabet of eighteen letters. The system of orthography developed, though highly ingenious, has proved entirely inadequate to its purpose. ”

“ It is clear, for example, that, in the interest of explicitness, we should have a separate symbol for the vowel sound in each of the following syllables: bar, bay, bann, ball, to cite a single illustration.
There is, to be sure, a seemingly valid reason for not extending our alphabet, in the fact that in multiplying syllables it would be difficult to select characters at once easy to make and unambiguous. Moreover, the conservatives might point out, with telling effect, that the present alphabet has proved admirably effective for about three thousand years. ”

“ No doubt the practical man does not want the alphabet required by the phonologist, who must denote every shade of sound and have separate symbols for the sounds heard not in English only, but in other languages as well, but the alphabet of the practical man should be based on that of the phonologist. The reformed alphabet should be one which would enable the child or the foreigner to recognize at once the sound of the word he is reading, and the philologist to determine the pronunciation of the writer. ”

“ Recollect that the foreigner is in the same predicament with respect to all the words in the language; and for this reason—the letters in our alphabet have no fixed sounds attached to them, nor is the same sound invariably represented by the same combination of letters. Now what we plead for is, some system of printing and writing, in which the same sound has always the same symbol, and the same symbol has always the same sound; and this we call, when printed, Phonotypy, from "fɷnɩ," voice, and "tɩpos," type ”

“ The fact however remains, that in the process [51] of the development of primitive systems of writing, before the use of an alphabet, the influence of language structure upon the systems of writing is an important factor in the case.
A curious phenomenon in the history of human speech is the preference shown by certain families of language for special combinations of vowels and consonants. The simplest combination is of a single vowel with a preceding consonant in the formation of syllables. ”

“ Yet against the levelling tendency of an orthography which does not protect pronunciation, it is possible that the earlier sound of a in these words may not be able to hold out forever.
So much for the first vowel of the alphabet. We are as badly off, though in a different way, when we come to the second. It emphasizes the degeneracy which has overtaken our whole orthographic and orthoepic system that the name we now give to the first vowel was originally and still is scientifically the long sound of the second. ”

“ As a whole, the new alphabet was so systematized that the sound of any letter, vowel or consonant was always the same, wherever it occurred, or whatever its alphabetical collocation. Nor did the new alphabet contain any silent letters, or fail to provide a letter for every distinct sound in the language. The difference between short and long vowels was compassed by a single vowel where short, and a double one, where long. ”

“ But in any changes which we may see fit to make in orthography, we must beware of supposing that, in a perfect alphabet, we should possess an absolutely controlling influence over pronunciation and sound changes. No doubt if sounds were accurately registered by a scientific alphabet, the more educated classes of the community who were familiar with this alphabet 373 and its denotation would be led to attempt to maintain their pronunciation in accordance with the standard afforded them by this. ”

“ It will be a true alphabet, the wonderful nature of which may be inferred from the fact that only two, or possibly three, such alphabetic systems are known with absolute certainty to have ever been independently evolved by human ingenuity [112] . From the above exposition we see how inevitably the Phoenician parent of nearly all late alphabets expressed at first the consonantal sounds only, so that the vowels or vowel marks are in all cases later developments, as in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, the Italic group, and the Runes. ”

“ That was the birth of the Alphabet, one of the greatest and most momentous triumphs of the human mind. The earliest phonograms represented syllables, not individual letters, the distinguishing signs for vowels and consonants being of yet later introduction; in fact, some alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have no true vowels, but only distinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we have 1, picture-writing; 2, ideograms ”

“ Further, the alphabets in use are, even the best of them, imperfect. It is plain that, when the members of a particular linguistic community, like, e.g., the Germans or the Portuguese, seek to make their alphabet a consistent picture of the sounds of speech, they aim merely at representing the sounds of their own language. ”

“ Just so, those who seek to reproduce the sounds of a language from written symbols, will be tempted to substitute similar sounds with which they are familiar for the sounds of the sketch, as, for our purpose, we may call the alphabet. Even in the case of a foreign language possessing an alphabet in some respects identical with our own, like the French, it is considered necessary to prefix to the alphabet a description of the sound intended to be conveyed by the symbol ”

“ Such is the general view of the additions, ejections, changes of power, and changes of order in the English alphabet. The extent, however, to which an alphabet is faulty, is no measure of the extent to which an orthography is faulty; since an insufficient alphabet may, by consistency in its application, be more useful than a full and perfect alphabet unsteadily applied.
§ 174. One of our orthographical expedients, viz., the reduplication of the consonant following, to express the shortness (dependence) of the preceding vowel, is as old as the classical languages: terra, θάλασσα. ”