Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 468

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VARIATIONS IN LETTERS AND CIPHERS
Other facts worthy of note are that in all the languages
of India (1) the letters are arranged in the same order
;
(2)
the short
beginning of
and long vowels are always placed at the
the alphabet and before the consonants
(3)
;
these vowels are purely initial letters, which are never
written except at the beginning of a word, special inflec-
tions being assigned to them when used in the middle of
a word or after a consonant (4) each consonant must have
a vowel inflection thus, b, c are pronounced ba, ca, and
their form is changed when other vowel inflections are
For instance, in Canarese the following letters
substituted.
change their form according to the vowel inflections to
which they are subject, thus
;
:
:
20
S3
&
ri
&
£5
y^)
£o
dhu
How is it that there is so much resemblance between
the various idioms of these languages, and so much dis-
Sanskrit
similarity between the letters of their alphabets ?
appears to be the common type on which the other languages
have modelled their phraseology how comes it then that
they have, in opposition to the mother-tongue, adopted
letter formations so different from that of their common
ba
be
bi
tha
they
thee
dho
;
parent
?
Similar variations are observable in the forms of their
Though they all use the decimal
ciphers or symbols.
notation, they differ widely in the formation of their
In the Tamil language, each decimal
arithmetical figures.
number is denoted by a different sign, thus
:
s u) or p&
1 10 100 1000
In Telugu, and in most of the other languages of the
country, they follow exactly the system which we have
adopted from the Arabs, the units being expressed by
a single figure, the tens by two, the hundreds by three, the
thousands by four, and so on.
This method, with the exception of a few slight differ-
ences in the shape of the figures, is the one most commonly
The similarity which exists between this method
used.
and that of the Arabs can hardly have been the result
If one nation did not borrow it from the other,
of chance.