Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/229

200 He confessed with admirable modesty that there were twelve characters of which he could make nothing: and this struck Lassen as being the most satisfactory portion of his work. Among them Grotefend had already condemned four as defective; one he had determined correctly as f, and he had nearly approximated to two others, th for t before u (22) and dj for j before i (32). St. Martin s alphabet in its complete form consists of twenty-five letters, represented by twenty-seven cuneiform signs. But of these letters he has three different modifications of the sound of e which alone monopolise six cuneiform signs. Three signs are allotted to h, two to α two to ou and two to ch, and two tor. In its latest form ten of the letters of our alphabet are left without equivalents in cuneiform — b, f, g, i, l, q, u, w, .x, z. He was not, however, always without a b It was probably not till after 1826 that he saw reason to substitute an m. Rask had recently suggested that the word which Grotefend transliterated 'Akeotchoschoh' should be 'Aqamnosoh,' and signified 'Achaemenian.' St. Martin had no suspicion of this when he first wrote his paper, and he translated the phrase 'race illustrious and very excellent.' But when Klaproth appeared, in 1832, the transliteration and translation were made to run as follows: 'Poun Oukhaamychye,' ' race d'Achémènes,' which differs from the first only by the substitution of an m where b occurred before. This is a farther instance of unacknowledged borrowinig. St. Martin accommodates himself to the view taken by Rask; but