is a letter; and is n the first principle?  “No; it is the last!” This grammatical error might have been avoided by saying, “Letters are the first principles, or least parts, of words.”  But still the definition would not be true, nor would it answer the question, What is a letter?  The true answer to which is:  “A letter is an alphabetic character, which commonly represents some elementary sound of human articulation, or speech.”

14.  This true definition sufficiently distinguishes letters from the marks used in punctuation, because the latter are not alphabetic, and they represent silence, rather than sound; and also from the Arabic figures used for numbers, because these are no part of any alphabet, and they represent certain entire words, no one of which consists only of one letter, or of a single element of articulation.  The same may be said of all the characters used for abbreviation; as, & for and, $ for dollars, or the marks peculiar to mathematicians, to astronomers, to druggists, &c.  None of these are alphabetic, and they represent significant words, and not single elementary sounds:  it would be great dullness, to assume that a word and an elementary sound are one and the same thing.  But the reader will observe that this definition embraces no idea contained in the faulty one to which I am objecting; neither indeed could it, without a blunder.  So wide from the mark is that notion of a letter, which the popularity of Dr. Lowth and his copyists has made a hundred-fold more common than any other![67] According to an other erroneous definition given by these same gentlemen, “Words are articulate sounds, used by common consent, as signs of our ideas.”—­Murray’s Gram., p. 22; Kirkham’s, 20; Ingersoll’s, 7; Alger’s, 12; Russell’s, 7; Merchant’s, 9; Fisk’s, 11; Greenleaf’s, 20; and many others.  See Lowth’s Gram., p. 6; from which almost all authors have taken the notion, that words consist of “sounds” only.  But letters are no principles or parts of sounds at all; unless you will either have visible marks to be sounds, or the sign to be a principle or part of the thing signified.  Nor are they always principles or parts of words:  we sometimes write what is not a word; as when, by letters, we denote pronunciation alone, or imitate brute voices.  If words were formed of articulate sounds only, they could not exist in books, or be in any wise known to the deaf and dumb.  These two primary definitions, then, are both false; and, taken together, they involve the absurdity of dividing things acknowledged to be indivisible.  In utterance, we cannot divide consonants from their vowels; on paper, we can.  Hence letters are the least parts of written language only; but the least parts of spoken words are syllables, and not letters.  Every definition of a consonant implies this.