Page:Proposals for a Uniform Missionary Alphabet.djvu/45

 After the missionary has written down a number of sentences, he should put them by for a time, and then read them aloud to the natives. If they understand what he reads, and if they understand it even if it is read by somebody else, his work has been successful, and a translation of the Bible carried out on these principles among the Papuas or Khyengs is sure one day to become the basis for the literature of the future.

Though this is a question which for the present would hardly come within the compass of missionary labours, still it will be useful to show that, if required, our alphabet would be found applicable to the transliteration of written languages also. Besides, wherever missionary influence is powerful enough, it should certainly be exerted towards breaking down those barriers which, in the shape of different alphabets, prevent the free intercourse of the nations of the East.

Let the philologist and archæologist acquire a knowledge of all these alphabets just as he is bound to learn the alphabets of dead languages or inscriptions. But, where there is no important national literature clinging to a national alphabet, where there are but incipient traces of a reviving civilisation, the multiplicity of alphabets—the only remnant of a bygone civilisation bequeathed, for instance, to the natives of India—should be attacked as zealously by the missionary as the multiplicity of their castes and the multiplicity of their gods. In the Dekhan alone, with hardly any literature of either national or general importance, we have six different alphabets,—the Telugu, Tamil, Canarese, Malabar, Grantham, and Singhalese, all extremely difficult and inconvenient for practical purposes. Likewise, in the northern dialects of India almost every one has its own corruption of the Sanskrit alphabet, sufficiently distinct to make it impossible for a Bengalese to read Guzerati, and for a Mahratta to read Kashmirian letters. Why has no attempt been made to interfere here, and at least to recognise but one Sanskritic alphabet for all the northern, and one Tamulian alphabet for all the southern, languages of India? In the present state of India, it would be