Page:Atlantis - The Antediluvian World (1882).djvu/248

230 Or take the letter q:

Maya, ; old Phœnician, and ; Greek,.

Or take the letter k:

Maya, ; Egyptian, ; Ethiopian, ; Phœnician,.

Or take the letter n:

Maya, ; Egyptian, ; Pelasgian, ; Arcadian, ; Phœnician,.

Surely all this cannot be accident!

But we find another singular proof of the truth of this theory:

It will be seen that the Maya alphabet lacks the letter d and the letter r. The Mexican alphabet possessed a d. The sounds d and t were probably indicated in the Maya tongue by the same sign, called t in the Landa alphabet. The Finns and Lapps do not distinguish between these two sounds. In the oldest known form of the Phœnician alphabet, that found on the Moab stone, we find in the same way but one sign to express the d and t. D does not occur on the Etruscan monuments, t being used in its place. It would, therefore, appear that after the Maya alphabet passed to the Phœnicians they added two new signs for the letters d and r; and it is a singular fact that their poverty of invention seems to have been such that they used to express both d and r, the same sign, with very little modification, which they had already obtained from the Maya alphabet as the symbol for b. To illustrate this we place the signs side by side:

It thus appears that the very signs d and r, in the Phœnician, early Greek, and ancient Hebrew, which are lacking in the