On the Origin of the Indian Brahma Alphabet c7.s3.43

c7.s3.43

With such propensities prevailing among the business people of modern times, it is difficult to believe that those belonging to a very remote antiquity would have acted differently and would have framed for their writing a vowel-system which their descendants discarded. Nevertheless—though the Brahman schoolmen undoubtedly have framed the Brāhma alphabet,—the introduction of its elements, the Semitic signs, into India is presumably due to the merchant class.² For the Vāṇiās naturally came most into contact with foreign nations. Moreover, they were the men who most urgently wanted a means for perpetuating the record of their daily transactions, while the Brahmans possessed since very early times the system of oral instruction for preserving their literary composi@H [85]tions and for teaching them to their pupils, to which they have always adhered. Traces of the existence of this system are found, as Professor Max Müller has already pointed out, even in the Ṛgveda, in the famous Frog-hymn, Ṛ. V., VII, 103, 5, where it is said of the bull-frogs, that the one imitates the cry of the other, “just as a pupil repeats the words of his teacher”. Its full development, which is found in the later Vedic works, both the Brāhmaṇas and the Vedāṅgas and has been described repeatedly,³ must certainly be as early as the period when the Semitic letters can have been imported, or even more ancient. With this system the Brahmans cannot have felt the necessity for writing so strongly as the men of business, and it is also for this reason improbable that they should have been the first Hindus who practised writing. Nay, it may be even doubted whether they cared to undertake the adaptation of the foreign invention very soon after it had become known to the mercantile class.