Trial in the Court of Vowels (6-10)

But this—this Tau—I would give him a worse designation, but that is a manifest impossibility; for without the assistance of two good presentable members of your Estate, Alpha and Upsilon, he would be a mere nonentity—he it is that has dared to outdo all injuries that I have ever known, expelling me from the nouns and verbs of my inheritance, and hunting me out of my conjunctions and prepositions, till his rapacity has become quite unbearable. I am now to trace proceedings from the beginning.

I was once staying at Cybelus, a pleasant little town, said to be an Athenian colony; my travelling companion was the excellent Rho, best of neighbours. My host was a writer of comedies, called Lysimachus; he seems to have been a Boeotian by descent, though he represented himself as coming from the interior of Attica. It was while with him that I first detected Tau’s depredations. For some earlier occasional attempts (as when he took to τετταράκοντα for τεσσαράκοντα, τήμερον for σήμερον, with little pilferings of that sort) I had explained as a trick and peculiarity of pronunciation; I had tolerated the sound without letting it annoy me seriously.

But impunity emboldened him; κασσίτερος became καττίτερος, κάσσυμα and πίσσα shared its fate; and then he cast off all shame and assaulted βασίλισσα. I found myself losing the society in which I had been born and bred[*]; at such a time

But why dwell on such trifles? I am driven from all Thessaly (Thettaly, forsooth!), θάλασσα is now mare clausum to me; he will not leave me a poor garden-herb like σεύτλιον, I have never a πάσσαλος to hang myself upon. What a long-suffering letter I am myself, your own knowledge is witness enough. When Zeta stole my σμάραγδος, and robbed me of all Smyrna, I never took proceedings against him; Xi might break all πάσσαλος, and appeal to Thucydides (who ought to know) as xympathizing with his xystem; I let them alone. My neighbour Rho I made no difficulty about pardoning as an invalid, when he transplanted my μυρσίναι into his garden, or, in a fit of the spleen, took liberties with my κόρση. So much for my temper.

Tau’s, on the other hand, is naturally violent; its manifestations are not confined to me. In proof that he has not spared other letters, but assaulted Delta, Theta, Zeta, and almost the whole alphabet, I wish his various victims to be put in the box. Now, Vowels of the jury, mark the evidence of Delta:—'He robbed me of ἐνδελέχεια, which he claimed, quite illegally, as ἐντελέχεια,' Mark Theta beating his breast and plucking out his hair in grief for the loss of κολοκύνθη. And Zeta mourns for συρίζειν and σαλπίζειν—nay, cannot mourn, for