Page:A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of India Vol 1.djvu/85

Rh slanting end-stroke distinguishes the letters, and to make it worse, the medial e େ is often so written as to be precisely like the ch. Then again, ତ ta, and ଢ ḍha, only differ by the size of the lower loop. ଉ u, and ଡ da, are also closely similar; ଗ ga, ଖ kha, ଚା châ, ରା râ, as also ଶ s (श) and ଣ ṇ (ण), puzzle the reader by the slightness of their difference, which if troublesome in print, where all the proportions of loops and strokes are rigidly preserved, is still more so in manuscript, where no attention at all is paid to the subject; and a knowledge of the language is the only guide in determining which letter is meant.

The Oṛiya characters in their present form present a marked similarity to those employed by the neighbouring non-Aryan nations whose alphabets have been borrowed from the Sanskrit. I mean the Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil, Singhalese, and Burmese. The chief peculiarity in the type of all these alphabets consists in their spreading out the ancient Indian letters into elaborate mazes of circular and curling form. This roundness is the prevailing mark of them all, though it is more remarkable in the Burmese than in any other; Burmese letters being entirely globular, and having hardly such a thing as a straight line among them. The straight angular letters which Asoka used are exhibited in the inscriptions found at Seoni on the Narmadâ (Nerbudda) in more than their pristine angularity, but adorned with a great number of additional lines and squares, which renders them almost as complicated as the Glagolitic alphabet of St. Cyril. The next modification of these letters occurs in the inscriptions found at Amrâvatî on the Kistna, where the square boxes have been in many instances rounded off into semicircles. From this alphabet follow all the Dravidian and the Singhalese; probably also we may refer to this type the Burmese and even the Siamese, and the beautiful character in use in Java, which is evidently of Aryan origin, as its system of Pasangans, or separate forms for the second letter of a nexus,