to things; yet so common is this error, that Murray himself has many times fallen into it.[87] Let the learner therefore be on his guard, remembering that grammar, both in its study and in its practice, requires the constant exercise of a rational discernment.  Those letters which name themselves, take for their names those sounds which they usually represent at the end of an accented syllable; thus the names, A, E, I, O, U, are uttered with the sounds given to the same letters in the first syllables of the other names, Abel, Enoch, Isaac, Obed, Urim; or in the first syllables of the common words, paper, penal, pilot, potent, pupil.  The other letters, most of which can never be perfectly sounded alone, have names in which their powers are combined with other sounds more vocal; as, Bee, Cee, Dee,—­Ell, Em, En,—­Jay, Kay, Kue.  But in this respect the terms Aitch and Double-u are irregular; because they have no obvious reference to the powers of the letters thus named.

OBS. 3.—­Letters, like all other things, must be learned and spoken of by their names; nor can they be spoken of otherwise; yet, as the simple characters are better known and more easily exhibited than their written names, the former are often substituted for the latter, and are read as the words for which they are assumed.  Hence the orthography of these words has hitherto been left too much to mere fancy or caprice.  Our dictionaries, by a strange oversight or negligence, do not recognize them as words; and writers have in general spelled them with very little regard to either authority or analogy.  What they are, or ought to be, has therefore been treated as a trifling question:  and, what is still more surprising, several authors of spelling-books make no mention at all of them; while others, here at the very threshold of instruction, teach falsely—­giving “he” for Aitch, “er” for Ar, “oo” or “uu” for Double-u, “ye” for Wy, and writing almost all the rest improperly.  So that many persons who think themselves well educated, would be greatly puzzled to name on paper these simple elements of all learning.  Nay, there can be found a hundred men who can readily write the alphabetic names which were in use two or three thousand years ago in Greece or Palestine, for one who can do the same thing with propriety, respecting those which we now employ so constantly in English:[88] and yet the words themselves are as familiar to every school-boy’s lips as are the characters to his eye.  This fact may help to convince us, that the grammar of our language has never yet been sufficiently taught.  Among all the particulars which constitute this subject, there are none which better deserve to be everywhere known, by proper and determinate names, than these prime elements of all written language.