TRANSCRIPTION OF GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES IN CENTRAL ASIA. 653:
garian would write the two words /as and csong, while a Pole would spell them tasz and czong; but it hardly needs to be said that these forms are not to be recommended. The Bohemian tai and 'eons- would perhaps be the forms that the philologist would most prefer, because in philological works the sounds in question very often are expressed in precisely this way; but for those readers who are not philologists these signs would be incomprehensible, to say nothing of their being in conflict with the third principle laid down below.
Hence there remain, so far as I am able to see, only the two signs sch and tsch, which are not very likely to be misunderstood by any civilised nation. The fact that these signs happen to agree with the German methods of orthography is really a matter devoid of importance, seeing that we have agreed to disregard all national susceptibilities. Moreover both these signs are well known already to everybody from a host of maps and books of travel.
These two sounds, sch and tsch, are voiceless sounds. The voiced sounds which correspond to them are indicated by the English sign si in occasion and by j in joy respectively, in French (the former sound only) by j in jouer, in Italian (the latter sound only) by gi, in Hungarian by zs and dzs, in Polish by z and dz, in Bohemian by z and di, and in philological works often by i and 3. Thus there exist various methods of writing the sounds in question, and none of them can be recommended for use in geographical literature, either because they are not clear and unambiguous or because they are in conflict with the third principle discussed below. If we were to employ the English j, it would be read by a Frenchman as z, and by most other nationalities as j (— English y in you). In Dr. Hedin's work there does not arise, it is true, any special difficulty in connection with these sounds, because when noting down his observations on the spot, he did not discriminate between z and s (any more than he did between z and s); consequently there was no need for me to devise any suitable combination of signs to reproduce z, and indeed the problem appears to me to be almost insoluble. I had therefore merely to find a convenient sign to represent d + z, which Dr. Hedin wrote dj in analogy with tj = t + s. Most people would however interpret this dj as d + j, that is to say, as a palatalized d, and for this reason I decided that it would not be clear, and consequently would be misleading. I chose therefore as being the least ambiguous the combination of letters dsch, which is frequently met with in German books. This shows not only that one has not to do with a palatalized d, but also that the spirant, when it immediately precedes a consonant, is not a voiceless 1, but a voiced a.. When pronouncing dsch the immediately following sch generally tends unconsciously to become voiced, and the result is the di that was desired.
In addition to the spirants already discussed several languages have a number of others, which cannot without great inconvenience be replaced by any of the five spirants that occur in the traditional Latin alphabet, f, h, j, s, y, and yet they must be expressed even in geographical literature. One such sound is the voiceless inter-dental spirant, the English th in thick. The sign th has been used almost traditionally as the sign of the spirant in question, and it is employed without hesitation in, for example, Icelandic names, where it is put in place of the Icelandic p, which is a violation of the third principle discussed below. For the same good reason dh
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