Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/181

 first column are by far the simplest, and it is on them that he fastened his attention. By some means which he has failed adequately to explain he professes to be able to transliterate the cuneiform signs, and he has gratified the curiosity of the reader by presenting him with a table showing the values he has found for a great variety of signs, among which he admitted several that are defective. He saw that more than one sign may be used for the same sound; and he assigned four each to the letters l, r, s and x. Conversely, he thought that the same sign might express the most diverse sounds.E, n, t, are given as the different values of a single sign, No. 5 .B,k,r, and b, x, y, are assigned respectively to two others, Nos. 27 and 31 ; while two different values for the same sign are quite common. Like many of his successors, he recognised a profusion of vowels, and he has allotted nine different signs to his three forms α, ἄ, ᾶ, It is scarcely surprising that out of the nine, one turned out to be correct, No. 21 ; and of the four signs he allotted to s, one was correct, No. 38. He was also successful in detecting the signs for d and u: but as his system was based on no intelligible principle, these results were purely accidental, and could not afford a guide to future inquirers. Having succeeded to his satisfaction in finding known equivalents for the unknown siins, and being thereby enabled to transliterate the cuneiform text, the next step was to endeavour to make some sense of it. This he sought to do by comparing the singular words that resulted from his system with those of languages he thought must be the most nearly allied, such as Zend,