CHAPTER IV

FOREIGN ALPHABETS

THE difficulty of learning national alphabets does not much trouble the linguist as long as he confines himself to European languages.

But even the German black letter causes some difficulty to the beginner, although it is nothing but a late modification of the Roman alphabet. The printed capitals are especially difficult of those who have learnt to recognize them perfectly by eye, not one in a thousand is capable of drawing them from memory. I remember, when I began to learn German by myself as a boy, that I at first confused the capital s with g, so that I read the word for 'care' as gorgfalt. By a similar confusion I read neunauge, 'lamprey,' as reunauge. This I found a hindrance to remembering these words; as soon as I read them correctly, I recognized their etymology and remembered them without difficulty.

So also the Greek and Russian alphabets are easily mastered by those who have an eye for form, while to others they may -cause considerable waste of time. Thus I was told by the late Prince L. L. Bonaparte that he never could learn Russian or any Oriental language solely because of their alphabets: he did not care how difficult a language was as long as it was in the Latin alphabet.

It would be superfluous to enlarge on the difficulties of such systems of writing as the Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese. The Chinese running-hand is said to take eight years to learn, even when the learner has thoroughly mastered the printed characters-itself a task of great difficulty.

TI ltiplicity of alphabets is a source of inconvenience in many 5, and also of expense.

Transliteration of Foreign Alphabets

Fortunately there is a growing tendency to substitute the Roman for the national alphabet in many languages. Holland, Sweden, England, and many other countries have given up the

The

black letter, and others are following in their steps. practice of transliterating into the Roman alphabet has extended to many of the Slavonic languages.

Transliteration is now the rule in quoting words from a variety of dead languages, as in comparative grammars. In such a book as Horn Tooke's Diversions of Purley (published towards the end of the last century) we still find the Gothic and Old English words printed in Gothic and Anglo-Saxon types. Now no one thinks of using these characters even in connected texts. So also Bopp, in his Comparative Grammar, gave Zend words in Zend types, and so on; all his successors transliterate the Old Arian languages except Greek. It is a curious illustration of the force of habit and prejudice that we still persist in printing Greek in late Byzantine characters which no ancient Greek would be able to read.

From a psychological point of view, the relations between national alphabets and transliterations are exactly parallel to those between nomic and phonetic spelling. The first thing is to learn the language itself in the easiest possible way, which involves beginning with transliterated texts. When the language itself has once been learnt, it can be easily read in any alphabet: Greek is still Greek in a Roman as well as in a Byzantine dress, Arabic is still Arabic even when written with Hebrew letters, just as English remains English in all the hundreds of systems of shorthand in which it has from time to time been written.

The argument most generally brought against transliteration is that it unsettles the learner's associations with the national alphabet.

The mere fact of any one's bringing forward this objection shows that his method of learning languages is a radically wrong one: it shows that he learns them exclusively by eye. There have been German Orientalists who made no distinction whatever between the Arabic hiss-sounds ~,, ;, b, ☺, 3, pronouncing them all (s), and recognizing them only by the form of their symbols. But even in an extreme case li his there ought not to be any great difficulty in establishings sual associations between the Arabic letters and their transliterations 5, 5, 2, 2, 0, 8 (or p, d).

This, however, only elicits fresh objections. The opponents of transliteration say, 'This would be plausible enough if we had only one fixed transliteration to learn; but unfortunately

almost every text-book has a special transliteration of its own: one cannot even get a grammar and a dictionary with the same transliteration. It is therefore impossible to carry out your advice of keeping to one transliteration till one has mastered the Arabic alphabet.'

The multiplicity of transliterations is certainly to be deplored, but it is no more an argument against the principle of transliteration than the multiplicity of phonetic notations is against the phonetic method. The same influences which are steadily bringing us nearer to our ideal of a general basis of phonetic notation will doubtless bring about uniformity in the transcription of remoter languages as soon as the results of our experience with European languages become known to Orientalists and others, who are still hampered by bad traditions and the unscientific methods of their native authorities to a degree which is incredible to those familiar with the phonetic method as applied to European languages.

The great safeguard against confusions that arise from conflicting transcriptions is the principle already insisted uponthat of beginning with the language itself, which of course means beginning with a mastery of its sounds. The beginner in Arabic who has once learnt to distinguish saif, 'summer,' from saif, 'sword,' by the combined associations of the peculiar sound and the special muscular sensations which accompany the utterance of the emphatic's, will be independent of transliterations, for the ideas of 'summer' and 'sword' will at once suggest to his mind combinations of sounds as well as combinations of letters, the former associations being the stronger and more direct: he will be in quite a different position from the student whose only definite associations are with the written

سيف and صيف

Orthographic Transcription.

If the national alphabet itself is phonetic, the transcription will be phonetic also: it will be a key to the pronunciation, and at the same time it will be a key to the original spelling of each word, so that any one who is acquainted both with the method of transcription and the national alphabet will be able to transliterate the transcription back into the original writing.

If the national alphabet is unphonetic, but only moderately

so, the most obvious course is to follow the same method as in reproducing the manuscript spellings of dead languages; that is, to add the necessary diacritics, or make whatever modifications may be found convenient for the purpose of indicating pronunciation, so that all that is necessary to transliterate back into the national writing is to ignore these supplementary distinctions. If the national writing makes unphonetic distinctions by having two or more letters or combinations of letters to express the same sound or sound-group, then the diacritics will have an orthographic, not a phonetic value, and will therefore be ignored except as giving the key to the original writing.

We thus have a distinction between a purely phonetic and an orthographic transcription, the characteristic of the latter being that it can always be transliterated back into the national writing whether the latter is phonetic or not. It need scarcely be said that every orthographic transcription ought to be phonetic at the same time, or at any rate not markedly unphonetic, although in many cases it is most practical to sacrifice rigorous phonetic consistency whenever an unphonetic detail of transcription does not cause real difficulty. Thus in transcribing German it is better to keep the distinction between sz and ss in fusz, musz, müssen, than to run the risk of subsequent confusion by writing fuss, muss; for such a spelling as fuss is only a compromise between fusz and the fully phonetic (fuus), and not even a beginner would think of trying to pronounce sz exactly as it is spelt.

The method of orthographic transcription has been successfully applied to Persian by H. Barbs, a full account of whose transcription by K. Feyerabend will be found in Phonetische Studien, iii. 162. Persian in itself is generally considered one of the easiest and simplest of languages, but in its written form it is distinctly a difficult language because of the irregularity, complexity, and ambiguity of its alphabet and orthography. Without the help of a skilled and patient teacher it is hardly possible to learn it in its nomic form, because, as Feyerabend remarks, 'one can only read out of it what one has already learnt and knows.' Persian has the disadvantage of being written with an alphabet in every way alien to its genius-the Arabic. Hence such a defect as the omission of the short vowels-which in Arabic occasions much less difficulty than might be supposed because of the regularity and symmetry of the Arabic vowel-system-becomes very serious in a language

D

like Persian, where there are no rules for determining à priori the vowel-structure of a word, as is to a considerable extent the case in Arabic. Persian is, besides, full of Arabic words, which are written in the Arabic orthography, while the pronunciation is only imperfectly preserved. The slavish application of Arabic rules of orthography to Persian words is a further source of unphonetic spellings. Barbs' transcription seems fully to solve the double problem of giving a phonetic transcription which can at the same time be transliterated back letter for letter into the national writing. The student begins with a Reader in which all the texts are transcribed on these principles. When he has gone through it, he begins again, and at the same time he is gradually introduced to the Persian alphabet and the rules of Persian orthography. Then a parallel Reader in the Persian writing is put into his hands, and the work of deciphering begins. Feyerabend assures us, as the result of personal experience, that this causes no difficulty in the second third of the first year's course; for, as he says, 'we soon learnt to recognize our old acquaintances in their new dress.'

Nomic Pronunciation

The principle that in learning a language through written texts we should strengthen our associations with the characters by associating each character with its proper sound, and should avoid giving the same sound to letters which are pronounced differently (p. 30), cannot always be carried out literally.

Sometimes the learner has not access to a native teacher or to reliable information about the pronunciation. These difficulties are of course greatly increased if he is learning a dead language.

Under such circumstances the learner need not hesitate to make up a pronunciation of his own on the principle of accompanying every written distinction with a corresponding difference of sound, so as to strengthen as much as possible his visual associations.

Many foreigners have begun English in this way, pronouncing, for instance, knowledge in three syllables (knovledge), not because they thought this was the real pronunciation, but simply as a means of fixing the spelling in their minds.