174 Proceedings of the Asiatic Society. [Sept. 



" 4. — Was there at any time perhaps only one symbol for h and Teh, 

 <j and yh and so on ? 



" 5. — What are the legends or historical facts connected with the 

 inventions of the Sanscrit letters or of alterations in the alphabet ?" 



Babu Rajendralala Mitra, in reply, stated that the Pali in the Ariano- 

 Pali inscription of Affghanistan was the only instance in which an Indian 

 dialect was written from the right to the left, but the Arian charac- 

 ters were avowedly of Phoenician origin and they bore no relation to 

 the indigenous alphabet of the country. They ran a parallel course 

 in India for about three centuries during the domination of the 

 Bactrians in the Punjab and Affghanistan, but never could take root 

 by the side of the old Sanskrit, and fell into desuetude on the expul- 

 sion of the Sakae from India, and that never, since that time, nor 

 before the introduction of the Arian, was Sanskrit ever written from 

 the right to left. The oldest form of the Sanskrit characters known, 

 the Babu said, were the Lat characters, which, according to James 

 Prinsep, were current six centuries before the Christian era. They 

 were of indigenous origin, either originally invented, or designed 

 from native models which existed in the country ; probably the latter, 

 judging from the perfection which they had attained at a very early 

 period. With regard to nomenclature, the Sanskrit, he said, never 

 had any thing in common with the cumbrous and unscientific system 

 of the Semites. It never used the names of natural objects to indicate 

 its literal sounds, nor force their rude figures to do duty for letters. 

 However much the names of familiar objects may enable children to 

 learn the alphabet quickly, they were by no means well adapted to 

 convey the sounds they were intended to represent. The alpha of 

 the Greeks, for instance, and the alif of the Persians, do not give any 

 idea of the power of the letter, whether it was equivalent to a 7 I or/; 

 and the lambda in the same way gives us four very dissimilar sounds 

 when we want only one. The English was not open to this objection 

 except in the cases of w and z. But the Sanskrit was superior to it, 

 for with great scientific precision it names its letters after their pure 

 literal sounds, added for the sake of pronunciation, to the fundamental 

 uncoloured vowel a instead of mixing them with different vowels at 

 random before and after them as in the English. Looking to its superior 

 arrangement, classification, wonderful precision and thoroughly inde- 



