ABSTRACT
Before dealing with the sounds themselves, it will be well to say something of the alphabet to be used in our international language. Most people will at once agree that it would be quite impossible to take the Russian, Greek, Hebrew or Arabic, or any other Oriental alphabet, in a language which must first and foremost be destined for use in the West-European and American world. Nor would it do to try and invent a purely phonetic alphabet independent of the Roman letters, although it would be possible and even fairly simple to devise an alphabet that would be simpler and much more systematic than the traditional Roman alphabet with its many deficiencies (nothing in the shape of the letters to show the parallelism between the pairs p:b, t:d, k:g, I:v; no sign for the simple nasal spelt n in finger, sink, and ng in singer, sing, etc.). There can be not the slightest doubt that we must take the Roman alphabet such as it is, simply because it is already used by the greatest number of people, at any rate of those who are likely to use an international language, and who are thus saved the trouble of learning a new one.
