Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/261

232 Another error, due also to the deference he professed for Zend analogies. arose from the supposition that the two letters which he took for u and ir had together the value of q. He compared them to the sound of q which is produced in Zend by the two letters sc or he, the latter being modified into ur in the Old Persian. Equally disastrous was his introduction of the two diphthongs hi for i, and αu for v̂. He observed that these two letters are occasionallv found together, and he concluded they must correspond to the Sanscrit diphthong αi= ê and αu = ô. The occurrence of an h for an α in one of them was a matter of small difficulty. Indeed he had actually found the αi= ê in Aidus=India; and suggests that hi may be the form it assumes as a medial. The most eccentric peculiarities of his transliteration may be traced to these unfortunate errors. His transformation of α into ng appears in his 'Aurᵃnghaa M^zdan^^a' for ' Aurahya Mazdaha.' The dipthong ur with the sound of q semed at first to yield a better result. By it he was able to read 'Quarᵃzmiᵃih' and 'Arᵃqᵃ'tis,' which are more suggestive of the true words Chorasmia and Arachosia than the correct forms 'Urarazamiya' and 'Haraur/ratish.' But, on the other hand, it led him to read 'qan' or ' 'qwan' (Chaonia) for 'Uvaja' (8usa), 'Aqᵃ' for 'Haur', 'Patᵃqᵃ for 'patuv,' 'Dᵃ"qistᵃKt"n' for 'duvaishtam,' and so forth. The diphthong hi (really yi) for the long ê produced 'tesam.' in the place of 'tyᵃisham.' The diphthong αu (really ku) for the long ô was still more disastrous. Burnouf, when he wrote 'aqunuch.' had nearly reached the correct transliteration of 'akunaush,' but it becomes scarcely recognisable in the 'aônus' of Lassen. The first sign of this diphthong had been long since correctly determined by Grotefend as a k. But its