Select Papers on the Subject of Expressing the Languages of the East in the English Character; Extracted from the Periodicals Published at Calcutta, in the Early Part of the Year 1834 - Softcover

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1834. Excerpt: ... which occur in the languages of the West. How then, ask they triumphantly, can these sounds be represented by Roman characters? Now, it must be owned that if these characters were of the nature of pictorial delineations, like the Mexican paintings now to be found in the Bodleian library; or of the nature of expressive symbols, similar to the Egyptian hieroglyphics; or of the nature of verbal representations, like the encyclopaedic letters of China;--it would not be easy to divert them into new channels. But the case appears totally different when we find that alphabetical characters, like the Roman, are merely arbitrary or conventional signs of sounds, i. e. any character, bearing as it does, no resemblance to the sound itself, may become the sign of any sound. All that is required is, that there be a mutual understanding amongst those that employ a letter of any figure, as to the sound which such letter is intended to represent. Since then all letters are, or ought to be, the arbitrary signs of certain elementary sounds, and since, in all languages, the greater part of the elementary sounds are the same--it follows that the greater part of the alphabetic letters of any language may be directly represented by Roman characters. Next, as to peculiar sounds, it may often be found, as in the Indian languages, that they are not radically diverse from all that find a place in the languages of the West. That which is said to be peculiar in the former, may be only some particular modification of an elemental sound that enters essentially into the latter. The difference, instead of being a radical one, may be only a difference in the tone, time, or mode of enunciating the same elementary sound. In this case, the Roman character, with some mark, above or below it, ...

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