Page:History of the Indian Archipelago Vol 2.djvu/19

OF JAVA. a follows it without the intervention of a vowel, the practice of the Javanese alpliabet differs from that of the Sanskrit. The Javanese, in such situations, give their consonants new forms, and often place the second in position underneath the first. This is evidently an improvement on the Sanskrit al- phabet, where confusion is the consequence of mul- tiplying and combining the characters, begetting rather an alphabet of syllables or of combinations of letters, than of the simple elements of sounds. The Javanese alphabet, as it relates to its own language, comes up to the notion of a perfect cha- racter, for it expresses every sound in the lan- guage, and every sound invariably with the same character, which never expresses but one. From this excellence of the alphabet, it follows, that the language is easily read and written, and a false or variable orthography, so common in European languages, is seldom discovered, even among the unlearned. In splendour or elegance the alphabet of the Arabs and Persians is probably superior to that of the Javanese ; but the latter, it may be safe- ly asserted, surpasses in beauty and neatness all other written characters. All the languages of the Archipelago are sin- gularly simple and inartificial in their structure, and the Javanese partakes of this common charac- ter, though it perhaps be on the whole the most complex and artificial in its formation.