Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/205

 himself entitled to add a gh and another e to his list—both wrong.

So also in the position in the cuneiform where he should expect to find a word corresponding to the one translated 'stirps,' in the Pehlevi he observed a word of three letters of which he knew the first two, p, u—. He hit upon a word in Pehlevi—bun— that had precisely the signification of 'stirps.' So he gave his p the alternate value of b and added n to his list. These also were both wrong. His attention was next turned to the two different inflexions which had been remarked at the end of 'king'. In the one consisting of three signs, he already knew the two last,— h α, and, for some reason we have not found explained, he assumed the first was a second sign for α. In this addition to his alphabet he was nearly right, for the letter has the value of h before α, i, u. In the second inflexion of four letters the first and third signs are the same, his e or α; and he learned from Anquetil that the Zend has a genitive ending e tsch α o. This was sufficient to add tsch and another o to his alphabet—both wrong. Here, then, are six more letters, gh, e, n, α, tsch and o to be added to the thirteen already found, making nineteen in all. There are twenty-five letters in the two inscriptions given by De Sacy in 1803; and there is no doubt that before that time Grotefend had, with two exceptions, completed his alphabet, as it is found in the Appendix to Heeren in 1815. According to it we see that he had already attempted to assign values to thirty-seven cuneiform signs, three of which are not to be found in Niebuhr's