Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/242

Rh altogether from his alphabet. He, however, incorrectly admits one sign for ô long. He considers the absence of th a form that occurs frequently in Zend, is probably due to the scarcity of documents. The want of the palatals, tch and dj may perhaps be assigned to the same cause; though more probably it arises from the nature of the alphabet itself, for these letters are only developments of the consonants k and g.

Burnouf acknowledges his obligation to Grotefend for twelve letters; but these should properly be raised to fifteen. The twelve he admits include eight correct values and four incorrect. The three he leaves unacknowledged are t (24), u (36), and ''α (41), all of which are correct, and they raise the number of correct values accepted from this source to eleven. Burnouf attributes three of his letters to St. Martin, namely t u and i': the first two are already accounted for from Grotefend; the i'' is indeed due to St. Martin, but it is wrong. Burnouf rejected the only absolutely correct value found by St. Martin, viz. v. Two letters, the m and n, he refers to Rask, from whom also he must have derived the q (25) which he erroneously substitutes for Grotefend's k.