Standard Alphabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and Foreign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in European Letters

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Williams & Norgate, 1863 - Phonetic alphabet - 315 pages
 

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Page 31 - ... has a method of notation peculiar to himself : But none has yet appeared in the form of a complete system, so that each original sound may be rendered invariably by one appropriate symbol, conformably to the natural order of articulation, and with a due regard to the primitive power of the Roman alphabet, which modern Europe has in general adopted.
Page 68 - Greek spiritus lenis. By closing the throat and then opening it to pronounce a vowel, we produce the slight explosive sound which in the Eastern languages is marked separately, but not in the European, except in the Greek. We perceive it distinctly between two vowels which following each other are pronounced separately, as in the Italian...
Page 28 - ... he makes in treating of his practical aim : — " It was natural that the European system of writing should be used for all those languages which had no system of their own. But here the same question arose as in linguistic science. Which orthography ought to be used ? Was it advisable to force upon those nations to which the Bible was to be presented as their first reading-book, the English orthography, which is complicated...
Page 74 - With respect to the former, the breadth of the tongue either touches or approaches the whole anterior space of the hard palate as far as the teeth, its tip being rather turned below.
Page 37 - Devnagari characters ; but they brought them to that state of perfection which they now possess. With an acumen worthy of all admiration, with physiological and linguistic views more accurate than those of any other people, these grammarians penetrated so deeply into the relations of sounds in their own language, that we at this day may gain instruction from them, for the better understanding of the sounds of our own languages. On this account no language and no alphabet are better suited to serve,...
Page 50 - On the same degree of the scale äs the sounds a* and a° we find a short sound in the middle column which leads from a to ö and ü, viz. the vowel in but, cut, son, does, blood, a sound still more peculiar to the English language.
Page 89 - It is not accidental but very significant, that, as far as I know without any essential exception, only the most highly civilised races — the leading nations in the history of mankind — distinguish throughout the genders, and that the Gender-languages are the same as those, which scientifically by linguistic reasons may be proved as descending from one original Asiatic stock. The development of peculiar forms for the grammatical genders proves a comparatively higher consciousness of the two sexes;...
Page 54 - ... this triangle does not suffice for the Slavonic and Wallachian relations, where two vowels are met with which Lepsius describes thus, in our notation for tongue and lip position, taking the lip positions of (i, e, a) as three unrounded degrees of opening (1280, d"). In the first place his u is (AU), "the tongue drawn back in itself, so that in the forepart of the mouth a cavity is left...
Page 34 - Simplification des Langues Orientales, ou méthode nouvelle et facile d'apprendre les langues Arabe , Persane et Turque , avec des caractères européens.
Page 61 - ... semivowel only, two different ones; which, however, are very closely allied, most frequently pass into one another, and in etymology, as is well known to all students of historical philology, hardly count together for more than one letter. They are described by Prof. Lepsius (p. 30 [27]) as both " formed by a contact, which is vibrating in r, and partial in I.

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