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which have been allotted to them solely for practical reasons, a great step will have been made towards facilitating the intellectual intercourse of mankind and spreading the truths of Christianity.

The realisation of this plan will mainly depend, not on ingenious arguments, but on good-will and ready co-operation.

 

III.

How can this Physiological Alphabet be applied to existing Languages?

a. To unwritten Languages.

After the explanations contained in the first and second parts, there is little more to be said on this point.

The missionary who tries to write down for the first time a spoken language, should have a thorough knowledge of the physiological alphabet, and have practised it beforehand on his own language or on other dialects the pronunciation of which he knows.

He should try to forget as much as possible the historical orthography of German, English, French, or whatever his language may be, and accustom himself to put down every spoken sound to the nearest physiological category to which it seems to belong. He should first of all try to recognise the principal sounds, guttural, dental, and labial, in the language which he is going to dissect and to depict; and where he is doubtful as to whether he hears a simple or a modified secondary sound, such as have been described in our alphabet, he should always incline to the simple as the more original and general.

He should never be led by etymological impressions. This is a great temptation, but it should be resisted. If we had to write the French word for knee, we should feel inclined, knowing that it sounds ginokyo in Italian and genu in Latin, to write it gĕnu. But the initial palatal sound in French is no longer produced by contact, but by a sibilant flatus, and we should therefore have to write şĕnu. If we had to write down the English sound of knee, we should probably, for the same reason, try to persuade ourselves that we still perceive, in the pronunciation of the n the former presence of the initial k. Still no one but an etymologist would perceive it, and its sound should be represented in the Missionary alphabet by "ni."