Sanscrit Writing and Language. 97 



nated in any other motive, — whenever he has to write a simple syllable or the 

 commencing part of a compound one with two or three characters, he always 

 jumbles fragments of those characters together, so as to reduce them to a single 

 letter. Upon the whole, when all the circumstances of minute correspondence 

 in the systems themselves, and in the use made of them, are taken into account, 

 I am in hopes that the connexion which I assign to them will be considered as 

 established nearly to a certainty, and I feel warranted in asserting that we cannot 

 rationally come to any other conclusion on the subject than the following one ; 

 namely, that as the Ethiopic syllabary is derived partly from a Greek, and partly 

 from a Shemitic origin, so the syllabic part of the Sanscrit system is derived 

 from that syllabary. 



With respect to the vowel-letters of the Sanscrit alphabet, it is not impossible 

 but that their formation may have been suggested to the Hindoo by the vowel- 

 marks he had previously adopted in imitation of those employed in the Ethiopic 

 syllabary ; and their shapes must, I apprehend, be considered as exclusively his 

 invention. But for the use he makes of them he is indebted, certainly not to his 

 own reach of thought, but merely to his observation of some foreign example. 

 When he places them before the characters of the first column of his syllabary in 

 order to express syllables, the two sets of letters thus combined, become virtually 

 in his practice, I admit, the elements of a superior alphabet ; but they are not 

 distinctly such in his apprehension of the subject. That he has only a confused 

 and obscure idea of vowels is obvious from his including among them the sounds 

 expressed by ri, ri, li, li, ang, agh ; and that he has a still more imperfect con- 

 ception of consonants is equally plain from the name he gives his characters of 

 " curtailed" or " incomplete," when used as such. The idea of a consonant in 

 the mind of a person who understands its nature, is just as complete as that of a 

 syllable ; what a letter of this kind denotes, indeed, is not a sound, but merely a 

 capability of modifying sound, on which account it is called a " power." But 

 the letter in respect to this power is complete ; and it is only when it is referred 

 to an actual syllabic sound, instead of to a mere potential element of such sound, 

 that it can be looked upon as curtailed or incomplete. What, however, I princi- 

 pally rely on in proof of the Pandit's indistinct apprehension of the nature of an 

 alphabet of vowels and consonants, and of the consequent impossibility of his 

 having made out himself that which he employs, is the circumstance of his 



VOL. XVIII. N 



