(i) The above table goes from the throat to the lips — from the back to the front of the mouth.

(ii)  b and d are pronounced with less effort than p and t. Hence b and d, etc., are called soft or flat; and p and t, etc., are called hard or sharp.

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9. Grammar of Letters. — Letters are conventional signs or symbols employed to represent sounds to the eye. They have grown out of pictures, which, being gradually pared down, became mere signs or letters. The steps were these: picture; abridged picture; diagram; sign or symbol. The sum of all letters used to write or print a language is called its Alphabet. Down to the fifteenth century, we employed a set of Old English letters, such as , which were the Roman letters ornamented; but, from that or about that time, we have used and still use only the plain Roman letters, as a b c — x y z.

The word alphabet comes from the name of the first two letters of the Greek language: alpha, beta.

10. An Alphabet. — An alphabet is, as we have seen, a code of signs or signals. Every code of signs has two laws, neither of which can be broken without destroying the accuracy and trustworthiness of the code. These two laws are:

(i) One and the same sound must be represented by one and the same letter.
Hence: No sound should be represented by more than one letter.

(ii) One letter or set of letters must represent only one and the same sound.
Hence: No letter should present more than one sound.

Or, put in another way:

(i) One sound must be represented by one distinct symbol.

(ii) One symbol must be translated to the ear by no more than one sound. 

(i) The first law is broken when we represent the long sound of a in eight different ways, as in —fate, braid, say, great, neigh, prey, gaol, gauge.

(ii) The second law is broken when we give eight different sounds to the one symbol ough, as in —bough, cough, dough, hiccough (=cup), hough (=hock), tough, through, thorough.

11. Our Alphabet. — The spoken alphabet of English contains forty-three sounds; the written alphabet has only twenty-six symbols or letters to represent them. Hence the English al-

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phabet is very deficient. But it is also redundant. For it contains five superfluous letters, c, q, x, w, and y. The work of the letter c might be done by either k or by s; that of q by k; x is equal to ks or gs; w could be represented by oo; and all that y does could be done by i. It is in the vowel-sounds that the irregularities of our alphabet are most discernible. Thirteen vowel-sounds are represented to the eye in more than one hundred different ways.

(i) There are twelve ways of printing a short i, as in sit, Cyril, busy, women, etc.

(ii) There are twelve ways of printing a short e, as in set, any, bury, bread, etc.

(iii) There are ten ways of printing a long ē, as in mete, marine, meet, meat, key, etc.

(iv) There are thirteen ways of printing a short u, as in bud, love, berth, rough, flood, etc.

(v) There are eleven ways of printing a long ū, as in rude, move, blew, true, etc.