Christian missions in the Telugu country - Uecf.net

THE COUNTRY AND PEOPLE 7
a pedantic display of learning by packing their language
as full as possible of Sanskrit. Too often what is
unintelligible to the crowd passes for high learning.
The writer once saw in an Indian paper an enthusiastic
description of a Sanskrit lecture, in which the crowning
praise was that the lecture was so hard that nobody
could understand it. In Telugu there has come to be
a wide divergence between the language of speech, even
polite speech, and the language of books. There are
practically two dialects to learn for these. We may
even add a third for poetry. The tendency among
modern scholars is to assmiilate them. Apart from
certain differences and corruptions, it may be said that
Telugu does not split off in different provinces into
dialects.
Telugu is one of the few Indian languages that Telugu
possessed a literature before the advent of European ''t^^a-
civUisation. As is weU known, many of the vernaculars
of India were first introduced into the rank of literary
dialects by the missionaries. Bengali, now one of the fore-
most of them, is an example ; the first serious writings
in it were brought out by the Baptist missionaries of
Serampore. The alphabet used in writing Telugu is
peculiar to that language, though it closely resembles the
Canarese. Like aU the modern Indian scripts, such as
Devanagari, Tamil, and the rest, it is descended from the
so-caUed Brahmi alphabet. This was one of the two
alphabets employed in the inscriptions of King Asoka,
about 270 B.C. It was written from left to right. But
whether, in spite of that fact, it is to be derived from
a North Semitic alphabet, introduced by Dravidian