When I speak of a mistake in an inscription, I mean a substitution of one letter for another, which was in use at the time, and which would have been used by a well-educated man. In early inscriptions one letter was used, even by the learned, for two or more sounds, not from ignorance, but from poverty.

SOUNDS OF ANIMALS.

7. Another rule which will perhaps cause a smile, but of which the violation has so much tended to embarrass the subject as to make a few words on it of use, is to take as authority the pronunciation of "men speaking articulately," and not the sounds of birds and beasts; a rule, which, if it requires authority, is borne out by no less a master than Aristotle, who, in his definition of a primary or elementary sound, excludes the sounds of animals: Στοιχεῖον μὲν οὖν ἐστι φωνὴ . . . ἀδιαίρετος· οὐ πᾶσα δὲ, ἀλλ ̓ ἐξ ἧς πέφυκε συνετὴ γίνεσθαι φωνή· καὶ γὰρ τῶν θηρίων εἰσὶν ἀδιαίρετοι φωναὶ, ὧν οὐδεμίαν λέγω στοιχεῖον. -Aristot. Poet. s. 34. Not that the sounds of animals may not be imitated by the human voice, and so expressed in writing as to give us generally to understand what animal is intended; but we can scarcely learn, with any degree of precision, the sound of each letter of which such imitative word is compounded. For instance, when Aristophanes speaks of the KóкKU, which says κόκκυξ, Kókku, we can have little doubt that he is speak

ing of the same bird which we call the cuckoo ; but when we come to an inquiry into the sound of each letter, if we assume that the Greek word and the English word are both correct imitations of the same sound, and therefore exactly alike, we shall draw the conclusion that the Greek O was sounded like our U, and the Greek Y like our OO: both of which inferences may be shown to be utterly false. Here again, take modern language as an instance: Hotspur says,

First Part Hen. IV., act 2. sc. 1. Schlegel translates this "miau." Does then the English EW sound like the German IAU? Indeed, when we consider how imperfect our imitations of the sounds of animals must necessarily be, many of them being sportive imitations of the imitations of our children, we shall be surprised at the weight which has been given to them by philosophers and scholars. According to this reasoning, Bárpaxoi in Aristophanes must mean ducks, as he makes them say kod, which, with the accent on the last syllable, is exactly "quacks"; and av, av, which he puts into the mouth of a dog, must be pronounced, wherever we meet with it," bow wow," to say nothing of the interesting disquisition as to the species of dog in whose mouth these canine interjections are placed by the dramatist; the Erasmians being favourable to the theory that he must have been a growling mastiff, while their opponents

consider that this part of the dialogue was car

ried on by a yaffing cur. imitative of animals are

Again, these sounds found in the comic

writers, where they probably often, if not always, contained some allusion to passing events: we have handed down to us a single line of Cratinus, Ὁ δ ̓ ἠλίθιος ὥσπερ πρόβατον βὴ βὴ λέγων βαδίζει. This line has been honoured with much notice by scholars its metre has been reformed by Porson, and its pronunciation discussed by Erasmus; the only thing in it which seems never to have been thought of is its meaning: can we suppose that Cratinus, who was not so inferior to Aristophanes as not to be generally classed with him, would have been content with so poor a joke as to describe a man saying Bǹ like a sheep, unless there were some incident, either introduced in the context, or well known to the audience, which gave a point to the satire? And yet we have this insulated line gravely put forward by critics as a proof of the precise manner in which the B and the H were pronounced by the Athenians in the time of Cratinus. The correctness of the general imitation is not disputed: we might have understood, without the word Tрóẞarov, that the animal which said Bǹ was probably a sheep, as an animal saying uù would most likely be an ox; but the question is, whether we can collect from it the exact manner of pronouncing either of the letters of which it is composed. These few observations having been

made upon the arguments drawn from the sounds of animals, it will not be necessary to make further mention of them; not because they are beneath our notice, for, supposing the question itself worth considering, so is everything which throws light on it, but because they would tend merely to mislead us.

PUNS.

8. Another consideration which has not been enough attended to, is, that we are inquiring into the exact sound which each letter ought to have, and we have not proved our point when we have found one something near it. Unluckily, with some of the writers on this subject a pun is as good as a treatise, and the Joe Millers of olden time of as high authority as the Horne Tookes. To give instances. Several writers, to prove that the EI diphthong ought to be sounded exactly like I, cite the two following jokes: the celebrated Thais, on her way to pay a visit to one whose nickname was Grason, or the Goat, being asked whither she was going, quoted in reply the verse of Euripides,

Αἰγεῖ συνοικήσουσα τῷ Πανδίονος.

Athenæus, lib. 13. p. 586. Here the pun consists in the equivocation between Aiyei (Egeus) and aiyi (the goat), or, as Eustathius somewhat pompously explains it, kaTÀ ὁμοφωνίαν παρηχητικὴν δύο πτώσεων δοτικών, ἤτοι τοῦ Αἰγεῖ ἡρωικῶς, καὶ τοῦ αἰγὶ ζωικῶς.—Od. Ι.

p. 362, ed. Basil. Diogenes, when in a bath, seeing a boy enter who was suspected of having stolen the clothes of the bathers, asked him whether he was searching for aλeuárior (the oilbox) or all' iuáriov (another coat).-Diogen. Laert. in vita Diogenis Cynici, ed. Webster, p. 340.

But here the object was fun and not philosophy. All that was wanting was, that the sounds should be sufficiently similar to raise a laugh. The second instance particularly, if treated as a strict demonstration, would show that the single A had precisely the same sound as the AA, and that the aspirate of iuáriov was not sounded.