of Ezra, has been said to contain all the letters.  It however contains no j; and, with respect to the sounds, it lacks that of f, that of th sharp, and that of u in bull.  I will suggest a few additional words for these; and then both all the letters, and all the sounds, of the English language, will be found in the example; and most of them, many times over:  “’And I, even I, Artaxerxes, the king, do make a decree to all the treasurers’ who ’are beyond the river, that whatsoever Ezra the priest, the scribe of the law of the God of heaven, shall require of you, it be done speedily’ and faithfully, according to that which he shall enjoin.”  Some letters, and some sounds, are here used much more frequently than others; but, on an average, we have, in this short passage, each sound five times, and each letter eight.  How often, then, does a man speak all the elements of his language, who reads well but one hour!

OBS. 6.—­Of the number of elementary sounds in our language, different orthoepists report differently; because they cannot always agree among themselves, wherein the identity or the simplicity, the sameness or the singleness, even of well-known sounds, consists; or because, if each is allowed to determine these points for himself, no one of them adheres strictly to his own decision.  They may also, each for himself, have some peculiar way of utterance, which will confound some sounds which other men distinguish, or distinguish some which other men confound.  For, as a man may write a very bad hand which shall still be legible, so he may utter many sounds improperly and still be understood.  One may, in this way, make out a scheme of the alphabetic elements, which shall be true of his own pronunciation, and yet have obvious faults when tried by the best usage of English speech.  It is desirable not to multiply these sounds beyond the number which a correct and elegant pronunciation of the language obviously requires.  And what that number is, it seems to me not very difficult to ascertain; at least, I think we may fix it with sufficient accuracy for all practical purposes.  But let it be remembered, that all who have hitherto attempted the enumeration, have deviated more or less from their own decisions concerning either the simplicity or the identity of sounds; but, most commonly, it appears to have been thought expedient to admit some exceptions concerning both.  Thus the long or diphthongal sounds of I and U, are admitted by some, and excluded by others; the sound of j, or soft g, is reckoned as simple by some, and rejected as compound by others; so a part, if not all, of what are called the long and the short vowels, as heard in ale and ell, arm and am, all and on, isle or eel and ill, tone and tun, pule or pool and pull, have been declared essentially the same by some, and essentially different by others.  Were we to recognize as elementary, no sounds but such as are unquestionably simple in themselves, and indisputably different in quality from all others, we should not have more sounds than letters:  and this is a proof that we have characters enough, though the sounds are perhaps badly distributed among them.