oct. — MAR. 1858-59] for the Indian characters. 263 



in a language which possesses no aspirate whatever. For these 

 reasons it appears to me that ch may best be transliterated by c, a 

 letter of which no other use has been, or can be, made in the Indian 

 languages, and which, therefore, can be used for this purpose with- 

 out any danger of misapprehension. On this plan, the Sanskrit c 

 and ch would correspond symmetrically to j and jh, and the awk- 

 ward compound chch would be replaced in Tamil by cc. 



Whether this suggestion be finally adopted or not, neither c nor 

 ch requires the help of any diacritical point. For this reason I 

 think the French cedilla c less suitable. 



It will be observed that I have adopted the English sh as the re- 

 presentative of the peculiar Sanskrit " s of Vishnu", which is 

 sometimes represented by sh, and the English s as the representa- 

 tive of the Sanskrit s. It is therefore, only the first of the three 

 sibilants, the " s of Siva," which will require some distinguishing 

 sign. 



(2.) We now come to those Indian sounds or characters which 

 cannot be represented by the Roman character without the aid of 

 accents or points. It will be seen that characters of this class are 

 not numerous, and that they can be provided for by the use of two, 

 or at the utmost three, distinguishing signs. 



(a.) The first set of sounds requiring our consideration are the 

 long vowels. The necessity of distinguishing long vowels from 

 short in each of the Indian languages cannot be disputed. This 

 is a necessity to which the Roman character must bend. All that 

 is required, however, to meet this necessity is to mark every long 

 vowel with an accent. It will then be understood that every ac- 

 cented vowel is long, every unaccented one short. The sign used 

 for this purpose may either be the sign of the acute accent, as d or 

 that of the circumflex, as d, or the ordinary prosodial sign of length, 

 as a. This point should be settled by practical printers. For cur- 

 sive writing, I suspect it will be found that the last of the three 

 signs, the simple horizontal line, is the easiest. 



The only condition for which I would stipulate is, that the ac- 

 cent or sign by which a vowel is made long shall not be used for 

 any other purpose. This appears to me to be a fatal objection to 



