The telephone, which seems to lower the value of differentiating
consonants, has revealed unsuspected likenesses. For instance the
ciphers, if written somewhat phonetically as usually pronounced, are
thus:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
nawt wun too three fawr faiv six sev'n eit nain

by which it will be seen that the ten names contain eight but only
eight different vowels, 0 and 4 having the same vowel _aw_, while 5
and 9 have _ai_. Both these pairs caused confusion; the first of them
was cured by substituting the name of the letter O for the name of
the zero cipher, which happens to be identical with it in form,[9] and
this introduced a ninth vowel sound _ou_ (= owe), but the other pair
remained such a constant source of error, that persons who had their
house put on the general telephonic system would request the Post
Office to give them a number that did not contain a 9 or a 5; and it
is pretty certain that had not the system of automatic dialling, which
was invented for quite another purpose, got rid of the trouble, one of
these two ciphers would have changed its name at the Post Office.

[Footnote 9: There is a coincidence of accidents--that the Arabic
sign for zero is the same with our letter O, and that the name of our
letter O (= owe) is the same as the present tense of _ought_, which
is the vulgar name (for nought) of the Arabic zero, and that its vowel
does not occur in the name of any cipher.]

[Sidenote: Æsthetic objections.]

In the effect of uniformity it may be said that utilitarian and