When by the fall or effacement of one of the ele-
ments of the diphthong,' the explosive, whether guttural,
dental, or labial, remained alone, the aspirate took the
place of the lost sound, marking the weakened effort of
the throat, or as it were the surprise of man before the
simple pure consonant to which his tongue at last gave
utterance. This character of the aspirate escapes us
at first, because different languages have kept certain
aspirates side by side with the explosives, or rather
have invented them to vary their vocabulary. Thus
Sanscrit, not content with the soft aspirates gh, dh, bh,
which seem to be earlier than the separation of the
idioms, has developed a symmetric series of rough aspi-
rates; while Zend, after rejecting the primitive aspirates,
has adopted new ones before v and r : thwam for tvam,
Mithra for Mitra. Greek, Latin, and the Teutonic
languages have had recourse to similar artifices proper
to each idiom. But when we remember that the ori-
ginal aspirates permute or alternate either with each
other or with pure consonants of the same order, and
that use is constantly abandoned to dialectal or even
to individual caprice, when we note, moreover, that h,
the soft labial, did not yet exist, but was included in
the aspirate bh, the transitional part which we attribute
to the aspirates will be more readily admitted. They
are intermediate between the groups of consonants and
the distinct utterance of the explosives.
We will consider them in Greek, where they are still
marked; in Latin, where they tend to disappear, chang-



Phonetics. — The Explosives. 389

ing, as in Sanscrit and in Zend, into continuous sounds
such as h and /.
