CEYLON BRANCH ROYAL ASIATIC SOCIETY. 



39 



his judgment, and the purity of his taste, makes the follow- 

 ing remarks : " By the help of the diacritical marks used by 

 the French, with a few of those adopted in our own treatises 

 on fluxions, we may apply our own alphabet so happily to 

 the notation of all Asiatic languages, as to equal the Deva 

 Nagari itself in clearness and precision ; and so regularly 

 that any one who knew the original letters might rapidly 

 and unerringly transpose into them all the proper names, 

 appellatives and cited passages occurring in tracts of Asiatic 

 literature." (vol. iii. p. 270.) 



As to expressing in writing the existing pronunciation of 

 any language, indeed it is a great question, whether much 

 pains should be taken about perfecting an alphabet in this 

 respect ; for it is only while a people remains in the state of 

 the dead, that the pronunciation of its language, remains 

 fixed. The utterances of an advancing and intermingling 

 people, must necessarily be always changing ; and if the 

 alphabet of such a people is always to give the actual sounds 

 of the words in use, the spelling of these words must always 

 be changing too — a far greater evil this, than that the com- 

 ponent letters of these words, should not exactly represent 

 the actual sounds, which are but the transient breathings of 

 the day. For by such continual and interminable changes 

 in spelling, all traces of the mother tongue should soon be 

 lost, and its grammar for the sake of a page on orthography, 

 would be obliged to leave the chapter on etymology wholly 

 blank. If Asia enter on the career of advancement in civili- 

 zation and discovery, on which the European nations have 

 already gone so far, each letter of the Asiatic alphabets will 

 soon acquire as great a variety of sounds as those of Europe 

 have already. To set forth, that every letter in the alphabet 

 of any language, has in every word uniformly the same 

 sound, seems at first sight indeed a compliment, both to the 

 alphabet of that language, and to the people whose alphabet 



H 



