somewhere between v and h. Again, Sanskrit has two sets of letters represented by t, th, d, dh, n, sh; one set is extremely dental (pronounced with the tip of the tongue touching the extremities of the teeth, or as close to them as possible in the case of sh), the other set is lingual (pronounced with the tip of the tongue far back upon or near the palate). The English t, d, n, sh are pronounced between these two extremes, but all natives. of India consider the sounds of these English letters as decidedly lingual, so that they always represent them by Indian linguals when transliterating English words. Unfortunately, European scholars have been of the opposite opinion, and have represented the dental t, th, d, dh, n as unmodified, and the linguals as modified, either by a diacritical dot (as in this work) or by using italics. For the sake of uniformity, this practice has been here extended to sh; but there can be no doubt that the dentals ought to be modified and the linguals unmodified, though neither group can be exactly represented by European sounds. Further, the letters ri do not adequately represent that peculiar Sanskrit vowel as pronounced in Maharashtra, where the Brahmans have been least disturbed by foreign influences. They say there that the correct sound is ru, and the tendency in colloquial Marathi is to corrupt it into u. The nearest European approach to this sound appears to be the English re in pretty, which word is never pronounced petty when the r is indistinctly sounded, but has a tendency to become pootty. In Avesta words th has the same lisping sound as in English and Greek, ṇ and ǹ have the sound of ng, q ought to be sounded like khw, zh bears the same relation to sh as z to s (that is, it has the sound of s in pleasure), and shk is pronounced sh by the Parsis. They also pronounce the other sibilants s and sh as written in this work, and there seems no sufficient reason for departing from their traditional pronunciation, which is corroborated, to a great extent, by Pahlavi and Persian words derived from the Avesta, such as Zaratusht, âtash, &c. The author's principal object in publishing these Essays originally was to present, in a readable form, all the materials for judging impartially of the scriptures and religion of the Parsis. The same object has been kept in view while preparing this second edition, giving a larger quantity of such materials collected from a variety of sources, which I may now leave to the reader's impartial judgment. MÜNCHEN, February 1878. E W. WEST. XIII.-SHORTER TEXTS (NYÂYISH, AFRINGÂNS, GÂHS, SIRO- |