ON THE ALPHABET. 3 
office of the civilized world. If new characters are used or the Roman 
characters modified so that types for their printing cannot be found in ordi- 
nary printing offices, the literature relating to such a language will, to a 
large extent, be excluded from the scientific and popular publications of the 
world. For these and similar considerations it is best to use the Roman 
alphabet, unmodified by additions thereto or by such diacritical marks as 
are not usually found in printing offices. 
Unfortunately in the use of the Roman alphabet for the English lan- 
guage many inconsistencies and absurdities have been introduced. The 
same sound is often represented by different letters or combinations of let- 
ters, and often the same letter has different values in different words; that 
is, in one word it represents some particular sound and in another word 
some other particular sound. How these inconsistencies have grown up 
cannot here be set forth. It is unfortunate that the English language, in 
many respects the most highly developed of all the tongues spoken by 
civilized people, is so absurdly burdened with a barbaric orthography. 
This difficulty of the inconsistent use of the alphabet in the English lan- 
guage is overcome only by an accurate knowledge of the spelling and pro- 
nunciation of each individual word of the language, as there are practically 
no rules for spelling and no rules for pronunciation. But he who first writes 
an Indian language prepares it for the study of those who are not familiar 
with it, and he will entirely fail unless he uses his alphabet with rigid con- 
sistency. In first writing a new language it should be an invariable rule 
to adopt a specific and distinct character for each sound; that is, let every 
sound have a character of its own and be invariably written with that 
character. 
These then are the fundamental rules to be observed in writing an 
Indian tongue: 
1. The Roman alphabet must be used without additions, and with only 
such diacritical marks as are found in ordinary fonts of type 
2. Each sound must have a letter of its own. 
3. Each character must be used to represent but one sound. 
4. The Roman alphabet must be used for sounds in the Indian tongue 
