It very seldom happens that a language will adopt exotic sounds, or embody in its system sounds other than those which are its linguistic heritage. Instances of this, however, do happen; the cerebral consonants of the Indo-Aryan languages, which are un common in the rest of the world, are presumed to have been taken over from the Dravidians. The Arabic is preserved in cated Urdu, but in Southern Urdu colloquial is replaced by X (the sound of "ch" in "loch"), and in Persian, except in the case of speakers who are influenced by a knowledge of Arabic, it is generally replaced by 9- (the sound of Arabic 5. Representation of Pronunciation.—Among a civilised community, language consists of two forms—a series of sounds, and a series of visual symbols, or letters, representing sounds. This method of making a visual language is known as a phonetic method of writing, and the system of symbols used is known as an alphabet.
On the other hand the visual language may be made without any apparent reference to the pronunciation of the oral language. Such a system is known as an ideographic system.
Most of the languages of the world have a phonetic visual form, the important exception being Chinese. The most widely used alphabets are the Roman, the Arabic, and the Indian, each with certain additions and modifications. The Arabic alphabet, for instance, is made to represent such widely diverse phonetic systems, as those of Arabic, Malay, Hausa, Persian, Urdu, and, until recently, Turkish.
So it has come about that alphabets, designed to represent the pronunciation of specific languages spoken many centuries ago, have spread over the modern world, and are Used to express the pronunciation of many languages that have nothing in common with the pronunciation systems for which they were designed.
Since, as has been said, sight and sound are irreconcilable, it follows that any attempt to represent by means of visual sym bols things that have no visual existence will be at best but par tially successful, and will rest upon a variety of conventions. Each symbol will originally do duty for one "sound"; various devices may be employed to indicate the relative length of sounds, if it is felt desirable to denote this feature of the pronunciation; the position of what is known as the stress or accent may, or may not, be marked ; it may be evident from other data. The intonation is not as a rule indicated, but there are certain de vices, such as punctuation marks, interrogation and exclamation marks, the use of a form of type differing from the rest, which are conventionally associated with certain features of the in tonation. The phonetic medium, although evidently the most ex
pedient, is a clumsy one for the general purpose of representing language, but it is the only one for representing pronunciation. The world's great alphabets are, as we have seen, in reality obso lete, because each was designed to represent the pronunciation of one language many centuries ago. When extended to other languages they have proved either inadequate or redundant. The Roman alphabet, suitable for a language like Latin with its sim ple system of five vowel sounds, is completely inadequate for English with its twelve vowel sounds. The Arabic alphabet, de signed for the peculiar word formation of Arabic, with its scanty vowels and abundant consonants, is inadequate for the Persian vowel system, and redundant for the Persian consonant system. Similarly the Devanagari alphabet proves inadequate to repre sent the pronunciation of the modern Indian vernaculars.
When, for various reasons, the visual language is a poor repre sentation of the existing state of the pronunciation of a language, the language is commonly said to be unphonetic. This means that there is an absence of regularity in the conventional relationship between sound and symbol, which may be due to the unsuitability of the alphabet, or to the fact that the visual language, having become established in popular use at some distant period, has refused to register the phonetic changes that have taken place since. Attempts to readjust the relationship between spelling and pronunciation are usually vigorously resisted in all languages, there being a universal desire, apparently, to see in the historical form of the visual language something either sacred, as in the case of Arabic, or etymologically valuable, as in the case of English. In some parts of the English speaking world tentative attempts at this readjustment, which is known as Spelling Reform, are being made.
Where, as in the case of many African languages, no traditional visual languages exist, systems of writing, usually with the Roman alphabet, less frequently with the Arabic alphabet, have been de signed, but here again the inadequacy of the alphabets has proved a serious obstacle. The sound systems of the great African lan guage families have nothing in common with the sound systems of Europe, and little in common with one another. It is interest ing to note that there is now being designed a special alphabet, based largely on the Roman, suitable for the representation of the pronunciation of the principal African languages, and that literature using the new script is beginning to appear.