of letters into vowels and consonants must have obtained.  All the speculations of the Greek grammarians assume this as a first principle.”  Again:  “I beg leave only to premise this observation, that I absolutely and unequivocally deny the position, that all the letters of the Hebrew alphabet are consonants; and, after the most careful and minute inquiry, give it as my opinion, that of the twenty-two letters of which the Hebrew alphabet consists, five are vowels and seventeen are consonants.  The five vowels by name are, Aleph, He, Vau, Yod, and Ain.”—­Wilson’s Heb.  Gram., pp. 6 and 8.

III.  POWERS OF THE LETTERS.

The powers of the letters are properly those elementary sounds which their figures are used to represent; but letters formed into words, are capable of communicating thought independently of sound.  The simple elementary sounds of any language are few, commonly not more than thirty-six;[96] but they may be variously combined, so as to form words innumerable.  Different vowel sounds, or vocal elements, are produced by opening the mouth differently, and placing the tongue in a peculiar manner for each; but the voice may vary in loudness, pitch, or time, and still utter the same vowel power.

The vowel sounds which form the basis of the English language, and which ought therefore to be perfectly familiar to every one who speaks it, are those which are heard at the beginning of the words, ate, at, ah, all, eel, ell, isle, ill, old, on, ooze, use, us, and that of u in bull.

In the formation of syllables, some of these fourteen primary sounds may be joined together, as in ay, oil, out, owl; and all of them may be preceded or followed by certain motions and positions of the lips and tongue, which will severally convert them into other terms in speech.  Thus the same essential sounds may be changed into a new series of words by an f; as, fate, fat, far, fall, feel, fell, file, fill, fold, fond, fool, fuse, fuss, full.  Again, into as many more with a p; as, pate, pat, par, pall, peel, pell, pile, pill, pole, pond, pool, pule, purl, pull.  Each of the vowel sounds may be variously expressed by letters.  About half of them are sometimes words:  the rest are seldom, if ever, used alone even to form syllables.  But the reader may easily learn to utter them all, separately, according to the foregoing series.  Let us note them as plainly as possible:  eigh, a, ah, awe, =eh, e, eye, i, oh, o, oo, yew, u, u.  Thus the eight long sounds, _eigh, ah, awe, eh, eye, oh, ooh, yew_, are, or may be, words; but the six less vocal, called the short vowel sounds, as in _at, et, it, ot, ut, put_, are commonly heard only in connexion with consonants; except the first, which is perhaps the most frequent sound of the vowel A or _a_—­a sound sometimes given to the word _a_, perhaps most generally; as in the phrase, “twice _a_ day.”