654 K. B. WIKLUND.
is nearly always employed to represent the corresponding voiced spirant = Icel. 6, Engl. th in there.
Phonetically the spirant th is related to the »explosive» t in precisely the same manner as the spirant dh is related to the explosive d. Hence we obtain the following simple rule of transcription: If it becomes necessary to invent a new sign for a • spirant, put an h after the sign for the corresponding (»homoorgan») explosive. Agreeably to this law, the voiceless guttural spirant is indicated by kh, because the corresponding explosive is k, and the voiced guttural spirant is represented by gh, because the corresponding explosive is g. In this present work however I have not quite seen my way to employ the sign kh, but have used ch instead of it. 'But in reality this is not at bottom such a great departure from the consistency aimed at as at the first sight it might appear to be. For the letter c is an old-established sign for the k sound ; indeed the latter is in the Romanic languages constantly indicated at the present day by the sign c. Compare also the English come, can, and so forth. In accordance with old philological tradition the sign ch, and not kh, should be used as the sign to indicate the voiceless guttural spirant provided one does not make use of the sign x, a sign which is hardly suitable for geographical orthography, because in the alphabets of the usual civilized nations this sign is equivalent to ks. The Greek letter ;{ is also used in this signification, but we are debarred from using it in the present case by principle III (below). The use of the sign ch is of course attended with this danger, that in English it is equivalent to tsch and in French to sch, and it is only in German that it is a guttural spirant. All the same I have felt constrained to employ it in place of kh, which occurs in no language with the same significance, because by so doing, we are at liberty to use the latter sign to indicate another sound, of which I will speak presently.
According to the rule laid down above, the voiced guttural spirant (= German g in Wagen) is indicated by gh, a sign which has indeed been generally employed for that purpose not only in philological works but also in others.
As additional terms in the equation t : th = d : dh = k, c : kh, ch = g : gh we might also have p : ph and b : 6h. The voiceless labial spirant is however usually designated in the Latin alphabet by f and its voiced counterpart by v. In this way ph and bh, which otherwise are demanded by the consistency aimed at above, are left free to be used to represent other sounds, and what those sounds are we discover when we turn to the languages of India. In these there occur entire series of »aspirated explosives», which are differentiated from the usual explosives p, 6, 1, d, k, g, by being immediately followed by an aspirate, a sort of h sound. It has long been the established practice when transcribing into the Latin alphabet to represent these sounds with the signs ph, • 6h, th, dh, kh, gh. Hosts of examples may be found in every map of India. A number of similar ph, kh etc. are found in the Indo-Chinese peninsula and in several books about China.
If, then, a place-name is encountered outside of classical literature containing the signs ph or 6h, we may generally be quite sure that it is intended to represent an aspirated p or b, not the corresponding spirants f and v. Again, if we come across a th or dh, we cannot without closer examination decide whether it is intended
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