438 General Meeting of the Asiatic Society of Paris. [No. 125. 



allow, try to approach to the others, and not prefer the extremes of its pe- 

 culiar pronunciation, as the school of Mr. Gilchrist has done. 



All these mutual concessions being granted, and all precautions taken, 

 I do not think, that a uniform alphabet will be obtained, by which 

 Oriental characters should be introduced into the text. It is generally 

 known, what importance Volney attached to this idea, and the Com- 

 mittee of Public Instruction in Calcutta for some years thought to have 

 so clearly solved this problem, as to encourage the publication of a great 

 number of works in what is named, the Roman alphabet in India, and 

 that this Committee for some time has suggested the truly monstrous 

 plan of substituting, even for the natives themselves, this alphabet for 

 their original ones. This experiment has not succeeded, and could not 

 succeed; a system of expressing intelligibly an occasional passage of 

 a language, and which may be useful for quotations, or when the ori- 

 ginal characters are wanting, may be applied to some languages, as for 

 instance, has been done to the Sanscrit; but there are other lan- 

 guages which do not admit this expedient, as for instance, the Arabic 

 language, where the orthography not only expresses the sounds, but of- 

 ten also the grammatical and etymological peculiarities which do not 

 touch the ear, and would be lost by any rendering; thus I doubt, 

 if any combination of Roman characters could represent the orthogra- 

 phy of the word Koran. But there is fortunately no necessity for sup- 

 planting oriental characters ; from this might arise some economical ad- 

 vantage in printing Oriental texts, but it would be infinitely less than the 

 inconveniencies of every kind produced by it. We are rather in want of a 

 system of expression sufficiently exact to reproduce the names of men and 

 localities in a way which may approach to the ordinary application of the 

 Roman alphabet, so that it is not repulsive to the mass of readers and 

 authors, and only requires slight modification in its application to the 

 languages of Europe. The adoption of a system, corresponding to 

 these conditions, would be a benefit to literature, and no public body 

 holds a better position than a Society such as yours to encourage and 

 to direct discussion on all the points connected with it, and to arrive 

 at a result which could obtain the assent, if not of all, which cannot 

 be expected in such a matter, but at least of the majority of authors. 





