y which
have _exactly the same radical tone_, and differ only in the long or short
emission of that tone."--_Ib._, No. 66. He then proceeds to state his
opinion that the vowel sounds heard in the following words are thus
correspondent: _tame, them; car, carry; wall, want; dawn, gone; theme, him;
tone_, nearly _tun; pool, pull_. As to the long sounds of _i_ or _y_, and
of _u_, these two being diphthongal, he supposes the short sound of each to
be no other than the short sound of its latter element _ee_ or _oo_. Now to
me most of this is exceedingly unsatisfactory; and I have shown why.

OBS. 12.--If men's notions of the length and shortness of vowels are the
clearest ideas they have in relation to the elements of speech, how comes
it to pass that of all the disputable points in grammar, this is the most
perplexed with contrarieties of opinion? In coming before the world as an
author, no man intends to place himself clearly in the wrong; yet, on the
simple powers of the letters, we have volumes of irreconcilable doctrines.
A great connoisseur in things of this sort, who professes to have been long
"in the habit of listening to sounds of every description, and that with
more than ordinary attention," declares in a recent and expensive work,
that "in every language we find the vowels _incorrectly classed_"; and, in
order to give to "the simple elements of English utterance" a better
explanation than others have furnished, he devotes to a new analysis of our
alphabet the ample space of twenty octavo pages, besides having several
chapters on subjects connected with it. And what do his twenty pages amount
to? I will give the substance of them in ten lines, and the reader may
judge. He does not tell us _how many_ elementary sounds there are; but,
professing to arrange the vowels, long and short, "in the order in which
they are naturally found," as well as to show of the consonants that the
mutes and liquids form correspondents in regular pairs, he presents a
scheme which I abbreviate as follows. VOWELS: 1. _A_, as in _=all_ and
_wh~at_, or _o_, as in _orifice_ and _n~ot_; 2. _U--=urn_ and _h~ut_, or
_l=ove_ and _c~ome_; 3. _O--v=ote_ and _ech~o_; 4. _A--=ah_ and _h~at_; 5.
_A--h=azy_, no short sound; 6. _E--=e=el_ and _it_; 7. _E--m=ercy_ and
_m~et_; 8. _O--pr=ove_ and _ad~o_; 9. _OO--t=o=ol_ and _f~o~ot_; 10.
_W--vo=w_ and _la~w_; 11. _Y_--(like the first _e_--) _s=yntax_ and
_dut~y_. DIPHTHONGS: 1. _I_--as _ah-ee_; 2. _U_--as _