Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/243

214 The twelve values which Buriiouf credits to his own account include the α of Grotefend and the b of Münter. There remain the two values which he was the first to fix correctly, viz. k (4) and z (18); the others are all incorrect. We have thus accounted for twenty-nine signs out of the thirty of his alphabet; the other, the ng (28) of Grotefend, he treated as uncertain, but suggested h, the true value being j{α). Besides the thirty just mentioned he gives three other signs, to which he hesitates to assign any value, though he thought they might all represent the sound of gh. These are, as we have already explained, the dj (32) and the 'k?' (33) of Grotefend, now ascertained to be j before i, and m before u. The other does not appear in Niebuhr's list, and Lassen is the first to assign it a value, g, which turned out correct (g before u).