Some pictures of Egyptian hieroglyphics and explanations will here be found to interest children much—-part of their drawing lesson might be to copy a hieroglyph alphabet. Then we might enlarge on the need for words to tell people what to do. Baby says “mamma,” “doll,” “puss,” but it wants also to say “come,” “give,” “go,” and this cannot be pictured, so people seem to have tried to represent sounds by drawing a picture of the mouth making the different sounds.
I suppose the first sound most babies make is a sort of mumbling, and if they open their mouths we get a sound like ma; now in all languages ma stands for mother, with some slight alterations. What is M like? Is it not much like a mouth shut up? and suppose you add a round shape to represent an open mouth you would get something like picture-writing ma. You might put the two side by side, a picture of a woman and ma—the Egyptians often had the two signs. The next easy sound is pa, and this stands in all languages that I know, for father. How could this be written? If you say ap you will notice a movement of the lips, which open with a sort of bursting sound. We may represent that movement by a stroke and put a round after it to stand for the open mouth P. There is another sound very like P, but not quite so sharply said. We hear it in ab. We can make the stroke as before, and put the loop lower down, to show that ba is a quieter sound than pa—so shorthand writers make a long stroke for the b and a short one for p (│b ╷p) and put no loop.
Thus we get three lip letters, but we can shut up the mouth in the middle—half shut it and we get n, which is half m. The breath will have to come of course through the nose. We can move the tongue suddenly from the teeth and get d as in ad, and write a stroke as before, but put a loop representing the open mouth behind it; the sound nearest to it which we hear in at would have the loop at the top,
, as we had in pa, but in our alphabet the loop has disappeared and we have only t. In shorthand we write a long horizontal stroke for d and a short one for t. Thus we have three dentals.
We may also shut up the throat and let the breath go through the nose, as in sing, or we may make the sudden movement quite in the throat. We could take the bird shape but think of the two strokes as if pointing down the throat in Κ, and for the softer sound only one pointer Γ, this was the Greek G. We make it rounder at the bottom now. For the first of the throat sounds we have no single letter, but we write an n to show it is a nose letter, and a g to show the shutting up is to be done in the throat.
So now you see we have got nine letters—three made with the lips, three with the tongue near the middle of the mouth, three in the throat. Three are made by sending the breath through the nose, three are made by a sudden opening and sending the breath through it with force, and three by sending the breath more gently. The names given to these different sorts of letters I may now give and the shorthand signs:—[6]
| Nasals. | Hard. | Soft. | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lip letters | m |  | p | ╷ | b | │ |
| Tooth letters | n |  | t | ╴ | d | ─ |
| Throat letters | ng |  | k | ‿ | g | ∪ |
[6] I give the characters of the script, which is much simpler for children than Pitman’s.
Reading books published by A. Chrysogon Beale (Sonnenschein) are perhaps the best for beginners. There are coloured pictures of the mouth; the deaf alphabet is given, and the words which are not written phonetically are gradually introduced. Sonnenschein’s books are also good, and Miss Soames’ Introduction to Phonetics.