Sobre El Autor
Créditos de la imagen: Godfrey Higgins, 30 January 1772 to 9 August 1833
Obras de Godfrey Higgins
Anacalypsis: An Attempt to Draw Aside the Veil of the Saitic Isis : Or an Inquiry into the Origin of Languages, Nations… (1992) 33 copias
Horae sabbaticae; or, An attempt to correct certain superstitious and vulgar errors respecting the Sabbath (2015) 4 copias
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Género
- male
Miembros
Reseñas
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 7
- Miembros
- 115
- Popularidad
- #170,830
- Valoración
- 4.5
- Reseñas
- 4
- ISBNs
- 26
PREFACE.
Upon reviewing what I have written in the following work, it has occurred to me
that I have not said quite so much, in my first chapter, on the mode usually adopted of
transferring written accounts from one language into another, as is expedient; I shall,
therefore, in this place, submit a few preliminary observations to my reader.
Man possesses organs of the mouth and adjoining parts, by which he produces sounds
expressive of his feelings. When these sounds become limited to certain defined, fixed
objects, and are meant to represent these abjects, they are called words, and the repre.
sentations of these objects in his mind or understanding are called ideas. Hence words
represent both the things and the ideas. Thus words are sounds significant of ideas.
Letters, in like manner, are marks formed by the mechanical powers of man to perpe
tuate and record these sounds significant, that they may pass to others, or to futurity
Now suppose a parent state to send off colonies, but before she send them off, that she
form a system of letters to represent such sounds as she has found needful for recording
her ideas. Suppose she make A to represent the idea of unity, B to represent the idea
of two unities, D to represent the idea of four unities, and O to represent some other
collection of unities; and these signs also she make, when combined in various ways, to represent the ideas of things treated of just now ; for instance,
that D A B should standtor a certain fish called a Dab. Now we will suppose a colony to go away, and to take this artificial system with them; in all future time, when they want to represent the word dab, and the idea of that fish, they ought to make the three signs d-a-b, and no
other; and they ought to do this if they wanted to represent the parent signs and the
idea, although they might have changed the sound given to these signs in their habits of
speaking. Should they have got into the habit of calling the A o, yet, in the case above
supposed, they ought to write dal, and not dob. The reader will observe, that if they… (más)