"I has a sound, long, as in fine, and short, as in fin. That is eminently observable in i, which may be likewise remarked in other letters, that the short sound is not the long sound contracted, but a sound wholly different."—Johnson. This extract has been made in order to add the authority of Johnson to the statement so often repeated already; viz., that the i in bite is not the long sound of the i in bit.
For the sound of u in guest, prorogue, guard, see the remarks on g.
As a vowel, y is wholly superfluous. It is a current remark that more words end in y (fortify, pretty) than in any other letter. This is true only in respect to their spelling. As a matter of speech, the y final has always the sound either of the ee in feet, or of the i in bite. Such is the case with the words fortify and pretty, quoted above. For some reason or other, the vowel e is never, in English, written at the end of words, unless when it is mute; whilst i is never written at all. Instead of cri, we write cry, &c. This is a peculiarity of our orthography, for which I have no satisfactory reason. It may be, that with words ending in e, y is written for the sake of showing that the vowel is not mute, but sounded. Again, the adjectives ending in y as any, and the adverbs in ly, as manly, in the older stages of our language ended, not in y, but in ig (manlig, ænig); so that the present y, in such words, may be less the equivalent of i than the compendium of ig. I venture this indication with no particular confidence.
The b in debtor, subtile, doubt, agrees with the b in lamb, limb, dumb, thumb, womb, in being mute. It differs, however, in another respect. The words debtor, subtle, doubt, are of classical, the words lamb, limb, dumb, &c., are of Saxon, origin. In debtor, &c., the b was, undoubtedly, at one time, pronounced, since it belonged to a different syllable; debitor, subtilis, dubito, being the original forms. I am far from being certain that with the other words, lamb, &c., this was the case. With them the b belonged (if it belonged to the word at all) to the same syllable as the m. I think,
however, that instead of this being the case, the b, in speech, never made a part of the word at all; that it belongs now, and that it always belonged, to the written language only; and that it was inserted in the spelling upon what may be called the principle of imitation. For a further illustration of this, see the remarks on the word could.
"Ch has a sound which is analysed into tsh, as church, chin, crutch. C might be omitted in the language without loss, since one of its sounds might be supplied by s, and the other by k, but that it preserves to the eye the etymology of words, as face from facies, captive from captivus"—Johnson.
Before a, o, u (that is, before a full vowel), c is sounded as k; before e, i, and y (that is, before a small vowel), it has the power of s. This change of sound according to the nature of the vowel following, is so far from being the peculiarity of the English, that it is common in all languages; except that sometimes c, instead of becoming s, becomes ts, tsh, ksh, in other words, some other sibilant; but always a sibilant. A reference to p. [153] will explain this change. At a certain time, k (written c, as is the case in Latin) becomes changed by the vowel following into ksh, and from thence into s, ts, or tsh. That the syllables cit, cyt, cet, were at one time pronounced kit, kyt, ket, we believe: 1. from the circumstance that if it were not so, they would have been spelt with an s; 2. from the comparison of the Greek and Latin languages, where the words cete, circus, cystis, Latin, are κητὴ, κίρκος, κύστις, Greek.
In the words mechanical, choler, &c., derived from the Greek, it must not be imagined that the c represents the Greek kappa or κ. The combination c + h is to be dealt with as a single letter. Thus it was that the Romans, who had in their language neither the sound of χ, nor the sign κ, rendered the Greek chi (χ), just as by th they rendered θ, and by ph, φ.
The faulty representation of the Greek χ has given rise to a faulty representation of the Greek κ, as in ascetic, from ἀσκήτικος.
"C, according to the English orthography, never ends a