musically on the ear, and beyond the numerals and a few utility words he is little tempted to dabble even with Urdu, the camp language, the lingua franca of the upper part of the peninsula. Jao! (Begone!) is the first word he learns and most constantly uses, the last syllable uttered on leaving.
From the babel of tongues, with no common alphabet, has come a confusion of spelling, and the modern or Hunterian method, although officially adopted by the government in 1880, does not enjoy general acceptance and use in India. Sir William Hunter gave years to investigating and recording local usages, to transliterating from Sanskrit and the vernacular the geographic names of the peninsula, and the publication of his great Gazetteer should have ended the confusion of nomenclature. Many of his departures were too radical for the older Anglo-Indians to accept—banglawas not the same as bungalow to them, kuli did not represent coolie, nor pankha the cooling punka; and five, eleven, and seventy-two ways of spelling a single place-name continue in common use—three distinct systems of spelling and local usage still prevailing, often in determined opposition to the Hunterian method. The first American authority, which is followed in this volume, does not wholly accept Sir William Hunter's decisions. The new method will ultimately prevail, but with another generation.
