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