62 Remarks on the inaptitude of the [JAM. 



of languages to which they are original; and if this be the consequence of 

 such a system to them to whom such languages are vernacular, how much 

 more extensively is its experience to be apprehended by those who come, as 

 foreigners, to the study of languages whose system of alphabetic sounds is 

 so widely different as are those of India from those of Europe? Europeans 

 as it is, with all the check upon a vicious pronunciation secured by the 

 distinct forms of the native characters, too often fail in acquiring their 

 proper sounds, and in consequence are but too extensively unintelligible in 

 their vocal communications. How often has this been felt and complained 

 of in civil functionaries and, where it is most injurious in its results, in 

 Missionaries of the blessed Gospel! The writer has known numerous, 

 cases in which the greatest zeal, and even large positive attainments, have 

 been greatly neutralised by a confused, inaccurate and indistinct pronuncia- 

 tion. The adult organs have, in fact, acquired a set, so to speak, which 

 does not readily admit of the enunciation of sounds various from those 

 acquired in childhood. Indeed, not only a facility of accommodating the 

 organs of pronunciation to new positions, &c. but a fine and accurate ear 

 too, is necessary, in the first instance, to distinguish the minuter variations 

 of sound among letters of the same class: some, entirely new, are seldom 

 perhaps thoroughly acquired by the best scholars. Now it is manifest that 

 this difficulty, and the concomitant danger of confounding the most impor- 

 tant differences in letters and words, would be immeasurably increased were 

 the helps and guards of the native characters removed and our own, how- 

 ever systematized, introduced. 



Nor would the evil be confined to foreigners. For, besides that increasing 

 intercourse with these would naturally and even necessarily tend, of itself, 

 to familiarize the natives to much vocal and written corruption of their 

 languages, were they also to adopt the Romanizing system, they would 

 themselves be in no small danger of extending that corruption. Thus the 

 words "3^ that, and s%, a shore, in distinct native characters cannot be 

 mistaken; but their equivalents in Roman letters, tat and tat differ only in 

 a point. How easily might the omission alone of that point create confusi- 

 on and obscurity ! But this is not all ; for as, in English, the letter / has ne- 

 ver the sound of ^ but of ^ only, in learning that language a native of In- 

 dia has first to encounter the difficulty of altogether discarding, wherever he 

 meets the letter t, the dental sound of 3, (immeasurably more frequent in his 

 own language than that of ^ which is the English t,) and is then inces- 

 santly exposed to the hazard of corrupting the sound either of the English 

 t or of his native letter s, and of settling down into a slovenly uniformity 

 of dental enunciation in one or in both languages, to the ultimate confu- 

 sion of words essentially different ; thus, at once, destroying the etymolo- 

 gies and obscuring the sense of the words he employs. So of the vowels also; 

 man, in English, he must pronounce nearly as jj-fa in Bengali; in reading his 

 own tongue Romanized, he must pronounce the same combination as 3X?t, 

 of which it is the equivalent. It is replied, I know, that Europeans 

 of all nations experience no such difficulty, and are exposed to no such 





