ORIENTAL, a term in use, in philology, to indicate a class of languages ; in geography, it is applied broadly to Asiatic countries east of Europe, but in a more restricted sense to the East Indies or the countries now known as British India. In mineralogy, it is applied to precious stones, the violet oriental amethyst, the green oriental emerald, the red oriental ruby, the blue oriental sapphire, the yellow oriental topaz, all variously coloured varieties of corundum. The oriental amethyst is of a purple colour, and is an extremely rare gem. Its colour can be destroyed by heat, and its purity then resembles that of the diamond. These stones are all found abundantly in tho Peninsula of India, but not of great beauty ; the ruby of the N.E. of Burma, however, is the true oriental ruby. They are all distinguishable from the other gems of the same names which have not the prefix oriental, by their greatly superior hardness and greater specific gravity. Oriental sapphires are found in gravel and sand in the island of Ceylon and in Pegu, but oriental emerald is the rarest of all the green varieties of corundum.
Oriental languages is a term applied to all the languages of Asia, whether of the Aryan, Semitic, or other class. Formerly, the term meant little more than IIebrew, Arabic, and Persian ; it now includes almost every language that is spoken east of Europe.-1. The Semitic, including old Semitic, new Semitic, and cuneiform writings ; 2. The Indo-European (or Indo-Ger manic, as it it called in Germany), including all Aryan languages, and comparative philology ; 3. The African, including Egyptian ; 4. The East Asiatic, or Ural-Altaic. With all the oriental languages those who would acquire them encounter their first difficulty in the variety of writing characters in use; and a second difficulty in the discordant manner in which, when a foreign character is used, or indicated by foreigners, the powers of the letters are employed. One mode
put forward by Sir William Jones, about the year 1788, was an analogous classification of the letters ; another proposed by Dr. John Borthwick Gilchrist, in the early part of the nineteenth century, was the representation of the sounds of the vernacular letters by equivalents of similar enunciation according to the powers of the letters as given by the English people ; in other words, the one principle is analogy, the other pronuncia tion. The latter principle is well adapted for expressing the oriental characters in English letters in such a manner that English readers un acquainted with the oriental characters would be enabled to articulate the words with a very near approach to their correct pronunciation, but it is for the most part unsuitable for all others of the European nations who use the Roman letters. The principle of analogy adopted by Sir William Jones retains the original letters with certain distinguishing marks, and permits the learned men of all Europe to follow the word to its source, and it has been generally followed by the learned. The most recent writer on the subject was Professor Horace Hayman Wilson in his Glossary, and he considered that the characters in the English alphabet had enabled him to represent letters in nine alphabets of thirteen different languages of British India. But to do this he had, by diacritic points and marks, and by compound letters, increased the English alphabet from 2G to 70 characters, 19 of the English letters having two to six forms, b, c, e, i, j, o, p, and u, each two ; g, h, and 1, each three ; d and k, each four ; a, r, s, t, and z, each five ; and n has six forms ; and he has even recommended other additions.