182 Report on Writing Indian Words [No. 8, New Series, 



relate chiefly to the mode of representing certain consonants, 

 have also been carefully examined. 



Among these, the most important are the alphabet 

 adopted by the Missionaries of Upper India in numerous 

 works already printed and published, and which has been 

 followed by Professor Monier Williams ; that employed by 

 Shakespeare in his Hindustani Dictionary, 3rd Edition, 1 834 ; 

 and that prefixed by Professor Wilson to his Glossary of 

 Indian Terms, 1856 ; — the last of which exhibits the first 

 attempt to elaborate a scheme embracing all the languages of 

 India. 



At the same time they have not overlooked the modifi- 

 cations observed in the published works of German and 

 French philologists, as far as they have been able to meet 

 with them. 



The Missionary alphabet of Bengal, which has only been 

 applied to Urdu, was at once seen to be inapplicable, because 

 it sacrifices critical accuracy to simplicity. 



The letters 3b and ^ are both represented by h—j J ^ and 

 \s are all included under z — <Jls (j* and ^ under s. The 

 principle of transliteration is thus abandoned. 



The plan proposed by Shakespear is free from this defect, 

 but is also confined to the Urdu dialect in its Arabic and 

 Devanagari forms. It has much merit, but contains several 

 redundancies, providing for distinctions of sound not ex- 

 pressed by corresponding letters, but to be acquired by 

 practice, and therefore unnecessary in a scheme of strict 

 transliteration. There are also some minor blemishes in his 

 mode of dealing with ch, ctih, gh, kh, ksh. 



Professor Wilson's scheme is complete in its requirements, 

 but cumbrous in the mode by which he has carried them out. 

 Thus, five of the six characters for n, are represented by 

 infra-linear diacritical marks, of which the first is an open 

 dot, and the rest points increasing in number from one to 



