Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/99

Rh on particulars with respect to foreign nations which have adopted the Arabic alphabet. I allude to the indecisive form of certain letters; the absence of any diacritic points in proper names, or the inaccurate way in which the points are placed. All Shemitic alphabets are bad channels of transcription, owing to the absence of vowels. How then is this difficulty to be overcome, when to this source of inaccuracy, we have to add another, even more serious, that of the uncertainty as to the letters themselves; the same character, for example, being, perchance, either b, n, t, y.