Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/187

 these letters with those of the vowels in other kindred languages; and he thought he discerned a strong resemblance between the first and third in the Zend character for α and in the Armenian for ο. He could not find a letter anywhere that resembled the second. However, he observed another cuneiform sign that also recurred with great frequency, and which might easily bear comparison with the Zend letter for a long. A likeness between a defective cuneiform sign (»-^ ) and the Zend letter for / gave him a fourth vowel. Similar considerations led him to assign the values of ou w ii y to another sign (^), a conjecture that turned out to be less happy than that of Tychsen, who accidentally hit upon its correct value, .s. Miinter had now i)ointed (mt six signs he thought ex])ressed vowels (viz. ^ e or a, y^>- ?, ^ 0, »-yyy a, »^^ /, ^ (^t, SzcX The second he dropped out of liis alphabet, for after careful search he could find no letter in any other alphabet to give him a ('hie to its value. Th(^ fiftli was not a genuine letter; and of the four that remained two were, as he surmised, vowels (Nos. 1 and 3). Thi' othei* two were both consonants. Only one of the former — the first, n, — was found to be correct; but it had alreadv been reco!»*nised 1)Y Tvchsen. The other — the o — was afterwards found to be i. He also identified seven other signs with the consonants y>, /// (two), r, ;• strong, s and />, which he obtained by the simple process of comparing them with other letters found in Zend, Armenian and (ireorgian, to which they had ' no small similarity.'^ Three of the sjons he selected were not genuine ; and of the four others the onlv one that was i'orrect was h [tz^). His efforts in this direction were

117.