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Report on Transliteration. 
[July, 
Report of the Sub-Commission for the Transcription of the 
Sanskrit and Prakrit Alphabets, 
The Sub-Commission appointed to consider the transcription in 
Roman characters of Sanskrit and Prakrit has done me the honour of 
entrusting me with the duty of communicating to you its views. 
My first duty is to recall to you the terms in which the question 
was placed before the Commission—who were not asked to elaborate 
an Alphabet of a theoretical nature capable of completely satisfying all 
linguistic demands. That would have been an arduous, and to tell the 
truth, an impossible task, inasmuch as, to be really definite, the pro¬ 
posals would have had to take into account not only scientific results 
already achieved or supposed to be achieved, but those also which 
without doubt, are held in reserve for the future. Its mission was a 
more modest one. In presence of the systems of transcription already 
adopted, if I may so say in the rough — on one hand by the Royal Asiatic 
Society and on the other by the Deutsche morgenlandische Gesellschaft— 
but open to modifications of detail, the Commission was called upon to 
express its opinion, and to attempt above all to arrive, by certain 
eclectic corrections, at the unification of the two series. We have 
neither the right nor the power to establish a universal uniformity, 
which would be the real desideratum. 
For instance, I myself did not put forward any French proposition. 
The transcriptions in customary use in the various countries have 
nevertheless, in a general way, shewn such an evident tendency to 
approach one another that it hardly seems presumptuous in these days, 
to predict a unanimous accord in the not distant future. It was then 
desirable to decide those propositions which appeared, from their very 
simplicity, to be of a nature to form by degrees, a rallying point for all. 
We were not able to lose sight of the essentially practical nature 
of the task assigned to us : we were above all bound to pay special 
attention to the presumed feeling of India, where the adoption of an 
uniform transcription in proper names and for daily use is so urgently 
necessary. 
Under these circumstances, the Commission could not fail to 
incline towards pure and simple acquiescence in the propositions which 
had been submitted to their consideration, in so far as these propositions 
were concordant: and this principle met with the unanimous approval 
of the Commission, except in one point. 
The two proposals agree in transcribing the r and l vowels by r and l 
(dotted). 
Monsieur de Saussure, who is a high authority on these matters, 
