1864,] Application of the Roman Alphabet. 355 



Having first arranged all the sounds prevailing in the known lan- 

 guages of the world, to these he applied the characters of the 

 Eoman alphabet as far as they would go, and for those sounds for 

 which he could not find corresponding signs in the Eoman alphabet, 

 he indented on other alphabets, or invented new ones, adapting thus 

 his alphabet to his languages, not vice versa. 



But if no existing alphabet is so perfect as to be made applicable 

 to all existing languages, speaking generally, the alphabets of most 

 languages which have received such a development as to entitle them 

 to take rank as literary languages, and all those which may be dis- 

 tinguished as classical, have been so far perfected in relation to these 

 languages themselves, and their symbols and sounds have become so 

 closely identified, that any attempt now to dissever the one from the 

 other, especially in the case of dead languages, would result in very 

 serious consequences — indeed consequences so serious, in my opinion, as 

 to give grounds for alarm, lest the true phonetic values of the original 

 letters should soon become irremediably confused, and in the revolu- 

 tion of epochs, the languages themselves might be lost. This is a view 

 of the case that will perhaps be disputed, yet it is one which will, I am 

 sure, be clearly intelligible to all who have occupied themselves with 

 decyphering ancient inscriptions, and are consequently aware of the 

 stumbling block those inscriptions prove to archaeologists, and numis- 

 matists, in which a language, foreign to the transcriber, has been 

 rendered by the ear, in a character equally foreign to the language 

 in which it is written. 



I venture to consider it proven then, that the Roman or any other 

 modern alphabet, cannot be applied to any of the dead or living lan- 

 guages of India for which an alphabet has been already perfected, 

 with advantage to those languages, and that any attempt to do so 

 except in so far as the transcription may suit the convenience of 

 foreigners and ripe scholars, would only lead to very great confusion. 



It remains, however, to enquire whether, setting aside those Ian- 

 guages, and patois f which have not been reduced to writing, we have no 

 languages which have received a considerable development, but for which 

 no written character, original or adapted, has been perfected. And 

 here our attention is at once arrested by a language which is some-* 

 what peculiar in its characteristic— a language which is written in many- 

 characters, yet which has no alphabet of its own; which has an ex, 



2 z 2 



