476 



Proceedings of the Asiatic Society, 



[No. 4, 



a phonetic way. The result was, that it was impossible to recognise 

 the most familiar of our old friends. To take an instance, we know 

 ' Cawnpore,' well enough but when we come across ' Khanpur' we can 

 make nothing of it. It did appear to him that the phonetic excellence 

 of the Roman character had yet to be demonstrated. 



There remained the Persian character now so extensively used 

 throughout a great part of India. Of course he meant the Arabic 

 character as modified and used in the modern. Persian, and here 

 generally called the Persian character. He had much practical ex- 

 perience of the use of this character, and thought it could not be for 

 one moment denied, that for ordinary business, and all the purposes 

 of cursive writing, this character possessed enormous advantages. It is 

 true, he said, that there is a want of precision and certainty about it, 

 when used to express foreign proper names and words not of custom- 

 ary use, being in fact, as ordinarily written, a sort of refined short 

 hand ; but even this could be for the most part remedied by the use 

 of Arabic punctuations in regard to particular doubtful words, and by 

 the introduction of our stops and capitals. It is also true that 

 the free use of this character requires much practice ; that in fact 

 it is not fitted for rude beginners, and can only be used with advan- 

 tage by highly educated people. But as used by them, it undoubt- 

 edly possesses a facility both for writing and reading unrivalled, and 

 is not only first, but is without a second. The rapidity and facility 

 with which business is conducted in this character, as compared with 

 any of the Nagri forms or even with English, is astonishing. In 

 truth he could hardly doubt that as it is a later product of the human 

 mind, so it is a more refined and polished instrument of human art 

 than the Nagri or Roman characters. 



Without therefore venturing an opinion, which he was ill-qualified 

 to prove, he would only venture with much diffidence to throw out a 

 suggestion whether there might not be advantages in the simultane- 

 ous use of several alphabets now prevailing in the greater part of 

 India. The arguments of the learned gentleman whose paper they 

 were discussing, had certainly suggested to him grave doubts whether 

 uniformity of alphabet is really so great an object, when there is diver- 

 sity of language, for as the learned gentleman well said, the time 

 required to master an alphabet might be measured by hours, while 

 that required for a language must be measured by years. If then a 



