Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/254

Rh the t, which he brought very close to their true values of r and tr— or ti as Spiegel writes it.

At the time we have now reached, the forty-two signs collected by Niebuhr had been reduced to thirty-three by the elimination of the diagonal and of eight others found to be defective. Lassen accounted for all the thirty-three that remained, and he added three others he found elsewhere. Of these one is treated by Grotefend as a defective sign for n; but it turned out to be a genuine letter. Burnouf was the first to recognise its claim, and it figures as one of his three conjectural signs for gh. Lassen gives it the definite value of g, which was correct, for it was eventually determined as g before u. The two other signs he added, t and  r, were both ascertained to be defective, and he subsequently dropped them from his alphabet. At this period, therefore, he admitted thirty- four genuine signs and two defective. His alphabet contained twenty-three correct values as opposed to the thirteen of Grotefend and the sixteen of Burnouf. It was made up of the


 * 2 from Mữnter—α and b;
 * 10 from Grotefend—s (or ç), r, d, p, t (24), u (3G), sch (or š ), f, α (41) and kh or k— the same as those accepted by Burnouf;
 * 1 from St. Martin—r; ;
 * 2 from Rask—m and n;
 * 2 deciphered simultaneously with Burnouf—k and z;
 * 6 added by himself—i, t (22), m, d, g (35), g (44)—

twenty-three in all. There were also two added by himself nearly correct —u (10), t (13), which, as approximate