1867.] Proceedings of the Asiatic Society 39 



and the Pali character. The name Pali is derived from the Sanskrit 

 pdli a house or palli a village, meaning a domestic or village dialect, 

 that is the vernacular, which was not necessarily, nor even probably, 

 Dravidian. But were we to leave all philological proofs aside, and 

 admit the northern Indian vernacular of former days to have been 

 Dravidian, still it must be borne in mind that that name has been 

 recently given to it by Europeans, and therefore it cannot be used as 

 an argument in favour of, or against, the question at issue. Prinsep 

 called the character Lat ; had he named it Sanskrit it would have ob- 

 viated much unnecessary discussion. The giant, in short, is of our own 

 creation, and we can destroy it in any way we like. 



" As to the Bactrian, those characters flourished coterminously with 

 the Pali for writing the vernacular in the trans-Indus Provinces, 

 and that too at a time when those provinces were under Bactrian 

 supremacy. It is very rarely met with in the chief seats of the 

 Brahmins, and the natural inference would be, that political influence 

 led to the use of a foreign alphabet in writing down a Sanskritic 

 vernacular — a Sir Charles Trevelyan of the time enforcing a pet 

 system of Bactrianism. The Koman letters are now being used for 

 writing many Indian dialects. Until recently, many up-country Hindus 

 wrote, and indeed even to this day write down their Hindi in Persian 

 characters. I have seen more than one Hindi book printed in Arabic 

 letters. Sheikh Sadi, the Persian moralist, wrote his rekhta verses — 

 that is Hindi — in Persian ; and well may have Bactrian satraps got 

 the Indian Vernacular of their time written in their own national 

 characters. At any rate the use of the Bactrian to record the Pali 

 edicts of A'soka in the Usafzai country, (and that is the oldest instance 

 of the use of the Bactrian,) can in no way prove the antiquity of 

 the Bactrian higher than that of the Pali, as the medium of writing 

 down Sanskrit. 



" One remarkable fact which proves the Brahminic origin of the Pali 

 alphabet is its fullness. It contains a number of letters, — aspirates, 

 sibilants and long vowels, — which no Tamilian language has ever had 

 ' any occasion to use. Had the alphabet been designed by the Tamils, 

 •< these would never have been devised. Mr. Thomas, in the letter just 

 ; read, has accounted for them by supposing that the Dravidians had 

 I them not, and that the Brahmins added them to adapt the alphabet to 



