Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/84

62 after that the various provinces began to make local variations of their own. The Kutila inscriptions date from about 800 to 1100, and as far as we know the history of those three centuries there was no one paramount sovereign during that time whose authority extended over all Aryan India, as there had been at various times in the preceding ages. We may suppose the Panjab to have been politically sundered from the Gangetic provinces during a great portion of that time, and to have entered upon a distinct course of linguistic development. This will account for the archaic character of many of its letters.

§ 18. The Bengali is the most elegant and easiest to write of all the Indian alphabets. It is very little changed from the Kutila brought down from Kanauj by the Brahmans whom King Adisur invited to Bengal in the latter part of the eleventh century. Such slight differences as are perceptible arise from an attempt to form a running hand, in which it should not be necessary to lift the pen from the paper in the middle of a word. This attempt has been to a great degree successful, and the modern Bengali character can now be written with greater rapidity and ease than any character derived from the ancient Indian alphabet. Even compound letters of some intricacy have been provided with neat and simple forms, and since the introduction of printing presses into Bengal the type has much increased in elegance. A printed Bengali book is now a very artistic production in typography.

§ 19. The same praise cannot be awarded to the Oṛiya character, which is of all Indian characters the ugliest, clumsiest, and most cumbrous. Some of the letters so closely resemble others that they can with difficulty be distinguished. Such for instance are the following, ଚ cha, ର ra, where only the