OBS. 3.—­These suggestions of Walker’s, though each in itself may seem clear and plausible, are undoubtedly, in several respects, confused and self-contradictory. Open and shut are here inconsistently referred first to one principle of distinction, and then to another;—­first, (as are “open and close” by Wells,) to “the relative size of the opening,” or to “the different apertures of the mouth;” and then, in the conclusion, to the relative position of the vowels with respect to other letters.  These principles improperly give to each of the contrasted epithets two very different senses:  as, with respect to aperture, wide and narrow; with respect to position, closed and unclosed.  Now, that open may mean unclosed, or close be put for closed, is not to be questioned; but that open is a good word for wide, or that shut (not to say close) can well mean narrow, is an assumption hardly scholarlike.  According to Walker, “we must be careful not to confound” open with long, or shut with short, or close with shut; and yet, if he himself does not, in the very paragraph above quoted, confound them all,—­does not identify in sense, or fail to distinguish, the two words in each of these pairs,—­I know not who can need his “caution.”  If there are vowel sounds which graduate through several degrees of openness or broadness, it would seem most natural to express these by regularly comparing the epithet preferred; as, open, opener, openest; or broad, broader, broadest.  And again, if “all vowels that end syllables may be said to be open,” then it is not true, that “the long sounds” of a in paper, father, water, cannot be so “denominated;” or that to “call the a in father the open a, may, indeed, distinguish it from the slender a in paper.”  Nor, on this principle, can it be said that “the broad a in water is still more open;” for this a no more “ends a syllable” than the others.  If any vowel sound is to be called the open sound because the letter ends a syllable, or is not shut by a consonant, it is, undoubtedly, the primal and most usual sound, as found in the letter when accented, and not some other of rare occurrence.

OBS. 4.—­Dr. Perley says, “It is greatly to be regretted that the different sounds of a vowel should be called by the names long, short, slender, and broad, which convey no idea of the nature of the sound, for mat and not are as long in poetry as mate and note.  The first sound of a vowel[,] as [that of a in] fate[,] may be called open, because it is the sound which the vowel generally has when it ends a syllable; the second sound as [that of a in] fat, may be called close, because it is the sound which the vowel generally has when it is joined with a consonant following in the same syllable, as fat-ten; when there are more than two sounds of any vowel[,] they may be numbered onward; as 3 far, 4 fall.”—­Perley’s Gram., p. 73.