328 M. M. Chakravarti— Language and Literature of Orissa. [No. 4 f 
But for the women and the children it will take a long time to shake 
off the influence of the surrounding Oj-iya speech. The few Telugu 
settlers are more and more forgetting their mother tongne and in 
ordinary outside talks are using the Oriya. Those who have settled 
for more than one generation have generally forgotten Telugu. 
I conclude this part of my article with a few remarks on the 
Oriya written characters and on the Oriya pothis or written hooks. 
Like most of the other Indian vernaculars, the Oriya has got its own 
characters. These characters are prominent for their invariable round¬ 
ness. Triangles and straight lines have been religiously avoided. The 
main reason for this roundness is to be found in the nature of materials 
on which the Oriya had to be written. 1 2 * The Oriya pctlizs (books) are 
of palm leaves written with an iron stylus. The palm leaves have 
longitudinous fibres. Straight lines (or triangles) would horizontally 
cut through the leaf fibres, and vertically would require a much larger 
physical power. Hence a curved or circular form is the easiest to write 
on a palm leaf with the sharp point of the stylus. This necessary habit 
of roundness was further strengthened by the Telugu whose letters are 
similarly circular. This is borne out by the Ganjam writings which 
are rounder than those in Cuttack or Balasore. 
The earliest specimen of modern Oriya writing is an inscription of 
the King Kapil§ 9 vara Deva on the Jayavijaya gateway of the Jagan- 
nath temple, Puri. Its date has been calculated by me as 9th December 
1436 A.D., or more than 460 years old. 8 The letters of this valuable 
inscription do not differ from the present types except in and and 
even with respect to them the difference is mostly in the terminal loops. 
By the fifteenth century the present characters may therefore be con¬ 
sidered fully developed. How much earlier they differentiated there 
are no data to ascertain. My belief is that the letters were evolved out 
of the so-called Kutila characters at different times, and that the 
whole set had differentiated almost entirely by the 14th century A.D. 
The pothis are composed of the leaves of the palm trees (Borassus 
Flabellus), which serve manifold purposes; when tied together as a 
broom, when spread out as a fan, when put between bamboos as a tatti y 
when fixed with a handle as an umbrella, and when evenly cut and 
seasoned as tdlpatra or the depository in writing of local knowledge. 
All leaves are not fit for being written. The leaves must be neither 
too old, nor too yOung, neither too much torn up nor too much curved. 
1 Beames’ Comp. Gramm, of the Mod. Aryan Language of India, Introduction, 
vol. I, pp. 65-6. 
2 See my article on the Oriya inscriptions of the 15th and 16th centuries, 
Jonrn. As. Soc. Beng., vol. lxii., Pt. I, No. 1, 1893, pp. 88-104. 
