1834.] On the Adaptation of the Roman Alphabet. 281 



III. — On the Adaptation of the Roman Alphabet to the Orthography of 



Oriental Languages. 



All who have devoted themselves to the acquirement of any of the 

 languages of India must have experienced in the irreconcileable difference 

 of the alphabets of the East and West a stumbling block in the porch 

 of their studies, and a source of constant doubt and difficulty, whenever 

 the occasion has arisen for expressing in the letters of their mother 

 tongue sounds and vocables belonging to any of those languages. It is 

 the scholar's object to write the words so that they shall be read with 

 a correct pronunciation by the uninitiated, and at the same time show 

 the true spelling of the original. He seeks therefore the letters of 

 known pronunciation that come nearest, not only to the sounds he de- 

 sires to represent, but likewise to the letters used in the language from 

 which the word is taken. Unfortunately it is not always easy to find 

 letters that will answer this double purpose, and the difficulty is much 

 increased by the circumstance, that all the vowels and several of the 

 consonants in use have more than one sound in the same language of 

 Europe, and some of them half a dozen sounds at least, if the vai-ieties 

 of all the countries which use the Roman alphabet are taken into ac- 

 count. What then was to be done when India fell into European hands, 

 and the necessity arose for continually writing Indian words in books 

 and public correspondence ? Every one at first of course had to 

 decide for himself, and unfortunately they who commenced the work 

 of writing Asiatic names in the alphabets of Europe were not scholars. 

 At present we shall confine ourselves to the proceedings of our own 

 countrymen in this respect, putting out of view all reference to the 

 modes of writing adopted in France and Germany, and elsewhere, and 

 those in particular which have been adopted recently, in consequence of 

 the efforts making by the literati of Europe, to bring into vogue the 

 Sanscrit language and its literature, at the very time that the half in- 

 formed of our countrymen are seeking to discredit both here. 



It would appear that they who first had occasion to write in Eng- 

 lish the names or words of the East, bethought themselves of the sounds 

 in that language which came nearest to those they desired to represent, 

 and spelled the words accordingly : thus sipahee was very generally 

 spelt seapoy, doubtless from the similarity of its sound to the well 

 known word teapoy, and in the jargon of the day, Surajood-doula was 

 corrupted into Sir Roger Bowler, and Allahabad became known as the 

 Isle of Bats. Many absurdities of this description might be pointed 

 out were it our object to seek them : even Governor Holwell, though 

 himself a Bengalee scholar, has in his printed tracts, Morattors — Shaw 

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