[38] Greek could just as well be read with Latin letters, for they are
almost as much like the letters which Demosthenes used as the late
black-letters are which we print as Greek.
[39] A dot after the letter and above the line is the best indication
of length. _a_ is here taken phonetically, the vowel in _arm_.
[40] A hand-mirror is a useful thing to have in these preliminary
phonetical exercises. In several places, the teacher requires each
pupil to bring his own along.
[41] Here also the experiment in hearing the voice distinctly by
holding the hands flat against the ears.
[42] I have often also conducted the exercise in such a way that the
class had to voice the sound when I raised my hand, and unvoice it when
I lowered my hand; thus I have made them articulate fffvvvffvvvff,
ssszzsss, etc., without any pauses.
[43] That I am not exaggerating (as people certainly will suspect in
about ten years from now), I could easily prove by means of a long
series of opinions from pedagogical meetings, articles in pedagogical
periodicals, newspaper reviews, etc.
[44] I have sometimes made the introduction longer, sometimes shorter
than here indicated; some teachers make it more complete, so that they
get a whole system of sounds tabulated before they pass on to the
reading.
[45] But stopped consonants, like _p_, _t_, _k_, are exceptions to
these instructions to isolate the sounds--every phonetician knows the
reason why. They should be uttered with a vowel before and one after,
e.g. _ata_.
[46] With the exception of the vowels [a·] in _alms_, [ɔ·] in _war_,
and [ə·] in _sir_.
[47] This method of procedure follows in the main the suggestions of
Klinghardt.
[48] If the teacher does not care to prepare such charts himself, he
can use Viëtor’s Lauttafeln.
[49] Besides, the different systems of modern phoneticians all resemble
each other very much--far more than did the earlier arbitrary methods
of designating the pronunciation (for instance, Walker’s, Flügel’s,
Toussaint-Langenscheidt’s, Tanger’s, etc.). Any one who has learned
Sweet’s phonetical transcription can easily read Passy’s or my own, and
vice versâ; the differences are hardly worth speaking of.
[50] I remember a lady’s dismay when a Frenchman used the combination
[stane] in a sentence; she could not understand the sentence until I
repeated it, inserting [sɛtane]. “O well,” she rejoined, “if he had
only said [sɛtane]; we always said it that way in school.” (_Cette
année._)
[51] The use of the French or German names of the letters of the
alphabet when words are being spelled in English is merely affectation,
and deserves only a shrug of the shoulders, especially since, as a
rule, it is not consistently carried through, but is applied only to
some few letters, _y_ being called [igræk] or _ypsilon_, _ch_, [seaʃ]
or [tseha], according to circumstances, and this in the midst of other
letters which are allowed to retain their English names with diphthongs
and everything. It is quite a different thing when the teaching is
wholly conducted in the foreign language; then it is necessary to
practise the foreign names of the letters, but then it must be carried
through consistently.
[52] Wer jemals in der schule die lautschrift als hilfsmittel zur
erzielung einer besseren aussprache benutzt hat, der weiss, welcher
nutzen aus ihr entspringt; der weiss aber auch, dass der schaden,
welchen sie bezüglich der orthographie anrichten kann, sich nur auf
wenige wochen erstreckt und äusserst gering ist, _jedenfalls viel
geringer als der schaden, welchen eine schlechte aussprache in der
orthographie anrichtet_. H. P. Junker, _Die neueren sprachen_, v. 99.
[53] See especially Murray, Bradley, and Craigie’s _New English
Dictionary_, A. Schröer’s edition of Grieb’s _Englisch-deutsches
wörterbuch_, and Rangel-Nielsen’s _Fransk-danske ordbog_. I am myself
transcribing the English words in Brynildsen’s _Engelsk-dansk-norske
ordbog_, two-thirds of which have already appeared. Edgren’s French
Dictionary should perhaps also be mentioned, but I have never seen it
myself.