he was capable,
he found himself supplied with only a score or so of symbols. Yet as
regards the consonantal sounds he had exhausted the resources of the
Semitic tongue. As to vowels, he scarcely considered them at all. It
seemed to him sufficient to use one symbol for each consonantal sound.
This reduced the hitherto complex mechanism of writing to so simple a
system that the inventor must have regarded it with sheer delight. On
the other hand, the conservative scholar doubtless thought it distinctly
ambiguous. In truth, it must be admitted that the system was imperfect.
It was a vast improvement on the old syllabary, but it had its
drawbacks. Perhaps it had been made a bit too simple; certainly
it should have had symbols for the vowel sounds as well as for the
consonants. Nevertheless, the vowel-lacking alphabet seems to have taken
the popular fancy, and to this day Semitic people have never supplied
its deficiencies save with certain dots and points.

Peoples using the Aryan speech soon saw the defect, and the Greeks
supplied symbols for several new sounds at a very early day.(8) But
there the matter rested, and the alphabet has remained imperfect. For
the purposes of the English language there should certainly have been
added a dozen or more new characters. It is clear, for example, that, in
the interest of explicitness, we should have a separate symbol for the
vowel sound in each of the following syllables: bar, bay, bann, ball, to
cite a single illustration.

There is, to be sure, a seemingly valid reason for not extending
our alphabet, in the fact that in multiplying syllables it would be
difficult to select characters at once easy to make and unambiguous.
Moreover, the conservatives might point out, with telling effect, that
the present alphabet has proved admirably effective for about three
thousand years. Yet the fact that our dictionaries supply diacritical
marks for some thirty vowels sounds to indicate the pronunciation of the
words of our every-day speech, shows how we let memory and guessing
do the work that might reasonably be demanded of a really complete
alphabet. But, whatever its defects, the existing alphabet is a
marvellous piece of mechanism, the result of thousands of years
of intellectual effort. It is, perhaps without exception, the most
stupendous invention of the human intellect within historical times--an
achievement taking rank with such great prehistoric discoveries as the
use of articu