Lectures on the Science of Language
Format: Paperback
ISBN13: 9781458831972
Paperback|9781458831972
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 103 LECTURE III. THE PHYSIOLOGICAL ALPHABET. TTJE proceed to-day to dissect the body of lan- T T guage. In doing this we treat language as a mere corpse, not caring whether it ever had any life or meaning, but simply trying to find out what it is made of, how sounds are produced, how impressions are made upon our ear, and how they can be classified. In order to do this it is not sufficient to examine our alphabet, such as it is, though no doubt the alphabet, if arranged according to scientific principles, may very properly be called the table of the elements of language. But what do we learn from onr ABC? what even, if we are told that k is a guttural tenuis, a dental sibilant, m a labial nasal, y a palatal liquid? These are names which are borrowed from Greek and Latin Grammars. They expressed more or less happily the ideas which the scholars of Athens and Alexandria had formed of the nature of certain letters. But these ideas were by no means always correct, and, as translated into our grammatical phraseology they have frequently lost their original meaning. Our modern grammarians speak of tervu/is and media, but they define tennis not as a bare or thin letter, so called in opposition to theaspirated consonants which in Greek were spoken of as thick, rough or shaggy (Scurv), but on the contrary as the hardest and strongest articulation; nor are they always aware that the mediae or middle letters were originally so called because, as pronounced at Alexandria, they seemed to stand halfway between the bare and the rough letters, i.e. the aspirates, being pronounced with less breath than the aspirates, with more than the tenues.1 Plato's division of letters, as given in his Oratylus, is very much that which we still profess to follow. He speaks of voiced letters ((fxavsvr...
| ISBN-13 | 9781458831972 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 1458831973 |
| Weight | 1.24 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 0.85 In |
| List Price | $27.74 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 382 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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