Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/283

254 He also accepted the corrected value of 41 as the aspirate h, following Jacquet and Beer; but this value we have already allowed to Grotefend's a for ha, as approximately correct. One other letter, 22 t which he made correct in 1836, he now changes into d'h. Thus, in 1844, he still had six wrong values; of these one had been correctly fixed by himself in 1836, 22 t; another, 16  ch, recently by Jacquet, and two by Rawlinson, 32, and 33  m before n.

There thus remained only two letters not yet provided with correct values: viz. 19, which was fixed by Holtzmann in 1845 as d before i, and 28 fixed simultaneously by Hincks and Rawlinson in 1846 as j before a.

In addition to the thirty-three signs in Niebuhr's alphabet that gained final recognition, two others have since been added. One of them was first found at Behistun by Rawlinson, 43 n, and does not appear in Lassen. The other, 44 was admitted in 1836 by both Burnouf and Lassen as gh and g, and is finally accepted as g before n. (Spiegel). But in the Memoir of 1836, Lassen farther sanctioned two other signs, (?) t, and (?) u, which he now rightly omits as defective signs for 24 t and 36  u.

His new alphabet shows also a great improvement in other respects. In deference to the decisive opinions of both Beer and Jacquet, Lassen has given up his double signs for the long and short vowels. He indeed admits that his a is in fact h; his î  is k, and his û  is defective. His diphthongs. and