“The medias had been classed as sonant in all the systems elaborated by the students of language who have studied comparative phonology,”
he does not hesitate to write as follows:—
“Professor Müller, like some other students of philology (who except Professor Whitney himself?) finds himself unable longer to resist the force of the arguments against hard and soft, and is convinced that surd and sonant are the proper terms to use; but, instead of frankly abandoning the one, and accepting the other in their place, he would fain make his hearers believe that he has always held and taught as he now wishes he had done. It is either a case of disingenuousness or of remarkable self-deception: there appears to be no third alternative.”
I call this a gentle reproof, as coming from Professor Whitney; but I must say at the same time that I seldom saw greater daring displayed, regardless of all consequences. The American captain sitting on the safety-valve to keep his vessel from blowing up, is nothing in comparison with our American Professor. I have shown that in 1854 the terms surd and sonant were no novelty to me. But as Professor Whitney had not yet joined our ranks at that time, he might very properly plead ignorance of a paper which I myself have declared antiquated by what I had written afterwards on the same subject. But will it be believed that in the very same lecture which he is criticising, there occurs the following passage (ii. p. 156):—
“What is it that changes k into g, t into d, p into b? B is called a media, a soft letter, a sonant, in opposition to P, which is called a tenuis, a hard letter, or a surd. But what is meant by these terms? A tenuis, we saw, was so called by the Greeks, in opposition to the aspirates, the Greek grammarians wishing to express that the aspirates had a rough or shaggy sound, whereas the tenues were bald, slight, or thin. This does not help us much. Soft and hard are terms which, no doubt, express an outward difference of b and p, but they do not explain the cause of that difference. Surd and sonant are apt to mislead; for if, according to the old system both p and b continue to be classed as mute, it is difficult to see how, taking words in their proper sense, a mute letter could be sonant. . . . . Both p and b are momentary negations of breath and voice; or, as the Hindu grammarians say, both are formed by complete contact. But b differs from p in so far as, in order to pronounce it, breath must have been changed by the glottis into voice, which voice, whether loud or whispered, partly precedes, partly follows the check.”
And again:—
“But although the hardness and softness are secondary qualities of tenues mediæ, of surd and sonant letters, the true physiological difference between p and b, t and d, k and g, is that in the former the glottis is wide open, in the latter narrowed, so as to produce either whispered or loud voice.”
In my introduction to the “Outline Dictionary for Missionaries,” published in 1867, I wrote:—
“Unfortunately, everybody is so familiar with his alphabet, that it takes some time to convince people that they know next to nothing about the true nature of their letters. Take even a scholar, and ask him what is T, and he may possibly say, a dental tenuis; ask him what is D, and he may reply, a dental media. But ask him what he really means by a tenuis or media, or what he considers the true difference between T and D, and he may probably say that T is hard and D is soft; or that T is sharp and D is flat; or, on the contrary, as some writers have actually maintained, that the sound of D requires a stronger impulse of the tongue than the sound of T: but we shall never get an answer that goes to the root of the matter, and lays hold of the mainspring and prime cause of all these secondary distinctions between T and D. If we consult Professor Helmholtz on the same subject, he tells us that ’the series of so-called mediæ, b, d, g, differs from that of the tenues, p, t, k, by this, that for the former the glottis is, at the time of consonantal opening, sufficiently narrowed to enable it to sound, or at least to produce the noise of the vox clandestina, or whisper, while it is wide open with tenues, and therefore unable to sound. Mediæ are therefore accompanied by the tone of the voice, and this may even, where they begin a syllable, set in a moment before, and where they end a syllable, continue a moment after the opening of the mouth, because some air may be driven into the closed cavity of the mouth, and support the sound of the vocal chords of the larynx. Because of the narrowed glottis, the rush of the air is more moderate, the noise of the air less sharp than with the tenuis, so that a great mass of air may rush at once from the chest.”
“This to many may seem strange and hardly intelligible. But if they find that, several centuries before our era, the Indian grammarians gave exactly the same definition of the difference between p, t, k, and b, d, g, such a coincidence may possibly startle them, and lead them to inquire for themselves into the working of that wonderful instrument by which we produce the various sounds of our alphabet.”