Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies - DUBOIS, Abbé Hindu Manners, Customs and Ceremonies, Dubois | Page 469

WRITING MATERIALS
at any rate probable that both
sarue source.
it is
borrowed
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it
from the
The Tamil arithmetical symbols seem, however, to bear
a greater resemblance to the Roman than to the Arabic
numerals. Like the Romans, the Tamils express the
greater part of their arithmetical signs by letters of the
alphabet, and use only a single letter to denote units,
tens, hundreds, and thousands as stated above.
But, dissimilar as are the written characters of the various
Hindu languages, they are still more dissimilar to the
written characters known to us as used by other ancient
nations, such as Syriac, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, &c.
L T nlike
the majority of Oriental languages, which are written from
right to left, Sanskrit and the various dialects of India
are written, like the European languages, from left to
right.
Paper is not unknown to the Hindus. They manufacture
not from cotton rags, as is generally believed, but from
the fibre of the aloe.
I am, however, inclined to believe
that the use of this coarse paper is of comparatively recent
it,
date in India, subsequent, that is, to the invasion of the
Moghuls, who must have introduced it. At any rate,
following the example of the Moghuls, the Hindus living
in the interior of the country, where palm leaves are not
procurable, use paper instead.
But more generally they
use black tablets named kadatta, on which they write with
a white pencil, called in Canarese balapu, made of a cal-
careous quarried stone which is very common in the country.
And it is with these materials that children learn writing in
the schools.
Nevertheless the ordinary practice almost everywhere is
to write on palm leaves, of which there are two species,
large and small.
The latter are the commoner and are said
to be the better
they are about three