Christianity with its virtues, its doctrine of self-renunciation, its labor transfigured by freedom and love, behold the agent, and the only one capable of producing the prosperity with which we would wish to endow nations. Let us understand these things, and we shall march with success to the conquest of social happiness. But we shall do better still. Penetrating the harmonious connection that unites effects to causes, we shall ask of it the secret of the superhuman power that escapes from it by submission to the Scripture; and soon we can repeat again the conviction of Lacordaire: "Christianity is the means of leading society to its perfection, by accepting man with all his weaknesses, and social order with its even condition. Society is necessary; therefore the Christian religion is divine."
From The Lamp.
Visible Speech.
Mr. Alexander Melville Bell has recently brought under the notice of the Society of Arts his very remarkable system of Visible Speech or Universal Language, which is (says Chamber's Journal) intended to remove an absurdity which vitiates all ordinary alphabets and languages. This absurdity is the utter want of agreement between the appearance of a letter or word and the sound which it is intended to convey; between the visible form of the symbol and the sound and meaning of the thing symbolized; between (for instance) the shape of the letter C and the value of that letter in the alphabets which contain it. This is an old difficulty—how old, we do not know; but to understand the proposed remedy, it will be necessary to have a clear idea of the defect to which the remedy is to be applied.
Spoken language may, for aught we know, have had its origin in an attempt to imitate, by the organs of the voice, the different sounds which animate and inanimate nature presents. Man could thus recall to the minds of those around him those notions of absent objects and past actions with which the sounds are connected. The expression of abstract qualities by the same means would be a later object, and one more difficult of attainment. When the eye instead of the ear had to be appealed to, or the signs rendered visible instead of audible, the system of hieroglyphics would at once suggest itself, by marking on a tablet or paper, a piece of ground or a smooth surface of sand, a rude picture of the object intended. When we get beyond these preliminary stages, however, the difficulty rapidly increases. There is no visible picture by which we could convey the meaning of such sentiments as are called in English virtue, justice, fear, and the like, except by so elaborate a composition as it would require an artist to produce; nor could an audible symbol for each of these sentiments be framed. It would take a Max Müller to trace how the present complication gradually arose. That there is a complication, anyone may see in a moment. What is there in the shape of the five letters forming the word table, in these particular combinations of curved and straight lines, to denote either the sound of the word or the movements of the mouth and other vocal organs which produce its utterance? Nothing whatever. Any other combination of straight and curved lines might be made familiar by common use, and substituted for our plain English word, with as little attention to any analogy between the visible symbol and the sound of the thing symbolized.
Numerous attempts have been made to devise some sort of alphabet in which the shapes of the letters should in some way be dependent on the movements of the vocal organs—not actual pictures of them, but analogies, more or less complete. Without going to earlier labors, we may adduce those of Professor Willis. Nearly forty years ago, he showed that the ordinary vowel sounds—a, e, i, o, u—are produced on regular acoustic principles; that "the different vowel sounds may be produced artificially, by throwing a current of air upon a reed in a pipe; and that, as the pipe is lengthened or shortened, the vowels are successively produced"—not in the order familiar to us, but in the order i, e, a, o, u, (and with the continental sounds, i like ee, e like ay, a like ah, u like oo.) Eighty or ninety years ago, Mr. Kratzenstein contrived an apparatus for imitating the various vowel sounds. He adapted a vibrating reed to a set of pipes of peculiar forms. Soon afterward, Mr. Kempelen succeeded in producing the vowel sounds by adapting a reed to the bottom of a funnel-shaped cavity, and placing his hand in various positions within the funnel. He also contrived a hollow oval box, divided into two portions, so attached by a hinge as to resemble jaws; by opening and closing the jaws, he produced various vowel sounds; and by using jaws of different shapes, be produced imperfect imitations of the consonant sounds l, m, and p. By constructing an imitative mouth of a bell-shaped piece of caoutchouc, imitative nostrils of two tin tubes, and imitative lungs in the form of a rectangular wind-chest, he produced with more or less completeness the familiar sounds of n, d, g, k, s, j, v, t, and r. By combining these he produced the words opera, astronomy, etc., and the sentences Vous etes mon ami—Je vous aime de tout mon coeur. By introducing various changes in some such apparatus as this, Professor Willis has developed many remarkable facts concerning the mode in which wind passes through the vocal organs during oral speech.
The useful work would be, however, not to imitate vocal sounds by means of mechanism, but to write them so that they should give more information as to their mode of production than our present alphabet affords. Such was the purport of the Phonetic system, which had a life of great activity from ten to twenty years ago, but which has since fallen into comparative obscurity. Mr. Ellis and the Messrs. Pitman published very numerous works, either printed in the phonetic language itself, or intended to develop its principles. Bible Histories, the New Testament, the Sermon on the Mount, Pilgrim's Progress, Paradise Lost, Macbeth, The Tempest—all were printed in the new form; and there were numerous works under such titles as Phonetic or Phonographic Alphabets. Almanacs, Journals, Miscellanies, Hymn-books, Note-books, Primers, Lesson-books, and the like. The intention was not so much to introduce new forms of letters, as new selections of existing letters to convey the proper sounds of words. There was an unfortunate publication, the Fonetik Nuz, which worked more harm than good to the system, seeing that it was made a butt for laughter and ridicule—more formidable to contend against than logical argument.
Mr. Bell contemplates something more than this. He has been known in Edinburgh for twenty years in connection with numerous works relating to reading, spelling, articulation, orthoëpy, elocution, the language of the passions, the relations between letters and sounds, logograms for shorthand, and the like. As a writer and teacher on these subjects, he had felt, with many other persons, how useful it would be if we could have a system of letters of universal application; letters which, when learned in connection with any one language, could be vocalized with uniformity in every other. There are two obstacles to the attainment of this end: first, that the association between the existing letters and sounds is merely arbitrary; and second, that international uniformity of association is impracticable, because the sounds of different languages, and their mutual relations, have not hitherto been ascertained with exactitude or completeness.
Mr. Bell, as he tells us, feeling that all attempted collations of existing alphabets have failed to yield the elements of a complete alphabet, tried in a new direction. Instead of going to languages to discover the elements of utterance, he went to the apparatus of speech itself, endeavoring to classify all the movements of tongue, teeth, lips, palate, etc., concerned in the pronunciation of vocal sounds. By this means, he hoped to obtain, from the physiological basis of speech, an organic scale of sounds which should include all varieties, known and unknown. To transfer these sounds to paper, in the form of visible characters, a new alphabet was necessary. To have adopted letters from the Roman, Greek, or other alphabets, constructed on no common principle of symbolization, would have been to introduce complexity and confusion, and to create a conflict between old and new associations. He therefore discarded old letters and alphabets of every kind. He set himself the task of inventing a new scheme of symbols, each of which should form a definite part of a complete design; insomuch that, if the plan of the alphabet were communicated by diagrams, each letter would teach its own sound, by expressing to the reader's eye the exact position of the sound in the physiological circuit. Could this object be attained, not only would there be a universal alphabet; there would be a scheme of letters representative of sounds, and not, like ordinary alphabets, associated with sounds only by arbitrary conventions.