THE AMBITIOUS KANGAROO.
They held a great meeting a king to select,
And the kangaroo rose in a dignified way,
And said, "I'm the one you should surely elect,
For I can out-leap every beast here to-day."
Said the eagle, "How high can you climb toward the sky?"
Said the nightingale, "Favor us, please, with a song!"
Said the hawk, "Let us measure our powers of eye!"
Said the lion, "Come wrestle, and prove you are strong!"
But the kangaroo said, "It would surely be best,
In our choice of a king, to make leaping the test!"
WONDERS OF THE ALPHABET.
By Henry Eckford.
Seventh Paper.
Great was the surprise of scholars, both Hindoo and European, when certain students of old languages claimed that the letters of the Sanskrit, the classical language of India, were originally derived from an alphabet, akin to the Phœnician, used by a great branch of the great race of peoples who are called Shemites, or Semites, after one of the sons of Noah. (The Jews, Arabs, Philistines, Hittites, Phœnicians, and Aramæans are Semites.) Those students believe that the wonderful peninsula of India, which, as far back as traditions go, has been crowded with men of various colors and different tongues, received a Semitic alphabet under two forms by two different roads, and perhaps at periods far apart. They believe that there was a land road and a sea road. They trace one alphabet by land, through Bactria and Cashmere, from one fierce and intelligent nation to another; and they believe that they have traced a second alphabet from Arabia to India by way of the Red Sea. The nation that carried the latter alphabet is supposed to have been the Sabæans, an ancient people of Arabia, who were once as powerful in the Southern seas as the Phœnicians, their kindred, were in the Mediterranean.
Perhaps the word Sanskrit means nothing to you, but it is the name of an important old Oriental language. Sanskrit stands in very much the same relation to many Eastern languages as Latin does to the languages of Italy, Spain, and France. In the last century, William Jones, a Welshman of marked genius, went, like many young Britons, to India to advance his fortunes under the British mercantile government of that land. It was he who first called the attention of Europe to Sanskrit. Since his day much of its poetry and legends has been read, many of its fables and dramatic works have been translated. The word Sanskrit means polished and perfected; and polished and perfected its alphabet certainly is. It is the most complete and most carefully devised alphabet of all those that we know. Sanskrit writing is very solid and handsome in appearance,—a stately script worthy of holding the decrees which mighty monarchs issued from courts magnificent with all the splendors of the Orient. There are not twenty-two letters as in the Phœnician alphabet, nor twenty-six as in ours—there are forty-seven! Instead of beginning with A, the Sanskrit alphabet begins with K. Why? Because K is a letter spoken from the throat. Indian grammarians carefully noted in what parts of the throat and mouth the different sounds of their language were made, and, for convenience, they systematized their ample alphabet on this admirable plan. They put their fourteen vowels by themselves as broad, open sounds which were shorter or longer; and, taking the consonants, they placed first on the list those which are spoken from the throat, then those spoken from the palate, then those spoken from the roof of the mouth nearest the brain, then those spoken from the teeth, and finally those spoken from the lips. The list of consonants starts with those uttered low down in the throat and ends with those uttered from the lips; added to these are the soft and flowing consonants called semi-vowels—Y, R, L, and V; and after these come the sibilants, or hissed letters, and the letter H,—forty-seven in all.