Sanscrit Writing and Language. 71 



correctly, as I conceive, talks of one syllabary written with different sets of signs. 

 " On sait que les Japonais se servent a present de deux genres d'ecriture, c'est- 

 a-dire, qu'ils emploient, ou les caracteres ideographiques des Chinois, ou un 

 syllabaire compose de quarante-sept syllabes, qui sont representees par diverses 

 series de signes." — torn, iii, p. 27. 



It is not, however, necessary to appeal to any authority on the point in ques- 

 tion ; common sense shows that every phonetic system must, in its general 

 nature, depend essentially on the powers which it represents, and on them alone. 

 Thus, for instance, our alphabet is called the English alphabet, whether it be 

 exhibited in Roman or Italic characters, in capitals or in small letters, in those 

 appropriate to print, or in such as are employed in manuscript ; but if the powers 

 be changed to those of French pronunciation, though the collection of characters 

 remains precisely the same — for of late the French have introduced w into their 

 writing for the expression of foreign sounds — yet the system is changed, and can 

 no longer be termed the English alphabet. What led M. Abel-Remusat to attach 

 to the shape of letters an importance that does not really belong to it, was 

 probably the circumstance, that, if the characters be indivisible into parts corres- 

 ponding to the elements of the syllables they represent, those syllables are less 

 likely to be decomposed. There is, however, no necessary connexion between 

 the one decomposition and the other. The characters might be indivisible in 

 the manner just mentioned, and yet the syllables be separated into their compo- 

 nent parts (of which the Hebrew letters afford a very striking instance) ; and on 

 the other hand they might be divisible in a way which would obviously give 

 assistance to the decomposition of the syllables, and yet (as shall presently be 

 shown) that decomposition not take place. But let the conformation of the cha- 

 racters aid the reader ever so much in this analysis, and tend ever so much to 

 suggest the operation to his thoughts, still as long as he failed to decompose the 

 syllables, the system would yet remain, in reference to his apprehension, no more 

 than a syllabary. 



In the second place, M. Abel-Remusat was quite unwarranted in representing 

 syllabic writing as distinct from alphabetic, in a degree at all parallel or analogous 

 to that in which it is separated from hieroglyphic designations. It is true that a 

 syllabary is intermediate, in the order of learning, between less imperfect alpha- 

 bets on the one hand, and hieroglyphs on the other (for we never could rise to a 



