The Hindee-Roman Orthoepigraphical Ultimatum; Or a Systematic, Discriminative View of Oriental and Occidental Visible Sounds by John Borthwick Gilchrist

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1820 edition. ...and consonants are promiscuously jumbled together, with appellations that seldom convey a clear idea of their respective powers; for whatever light omega may shed on the tail of this alphabetical comet we must confess alpha is a species of caput mortuum, that the learned even do not well comprehend, but which would have been as plain as the sun, had the redundant Ipha proved significant and run, like the sunskrit kar, as it does through the entire train from u-kar, the perspicuous head, to hu-kar its luminous end; this being a letter that, contrasted with the insignificant h aitch of our system, displays the brightness of day opposed to the darkness of night, in its translation of breath-er or the breath making letter. In some cases a faint attempt has been made by the arabs and persians to aid the acquisition of consonants by their duplicate names, meem, noon; whence a learner may conceive the sounds required, whether termed mee, eem, noo, oon; yet here even consistency has been scouted as needless, otherwise the pair of congenials would have been meem, neen, or moom, noon, and jeem, cheem, dal, zal, seen, sheen, &c. ought also to have had their names uniform with one plan or other, as jeej, cheech, deed, zeez, sees, sheesh, &c. or jooj, chooch, and so on. Whatever the advantages of such a literal nomenclature might be, I confess my partiality for thehinduwee method, as the simplest by far of the two, mu, bu, pu, nu, du, su, shu, hu, (with the shortest possible sound of a in hall, heard in hull) which last is literally and truly, as its name hu-kar implies, a mere breathing or aspirate, not hech, literally nothing. When we reverse the position of the vowel and say um, ub, up, the simplicity and facility of nature is set at nought, and the ...