Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/337

308 between June 1840 and January 1847; and the last two appeared after he had seen the opinions of Rawlin- son to which we have referred.^ These papers were communicated without dehiy to the Asiatic Society in London, as we k^arn from a note by the Secretary, who says he had just received (June 1840) a ('ommunication on the Median cuneiform from ' a learned clergyman in a remote part of Ireland.' -

Hincks diflered in some material points from Westergaard. He would not admit the long vowels, and limited them to a, i and u, adding, however, er to their number. He restricted the simple consonants to m, ]>^ t^ k^ 5, and n; and from tliese he thought all the other signs were combined. He rightly admitted the compound syllabic form, consisting of two consonants joined by a vowel, which Westergaard had overlooked, and he even allows the occasional use of a double syllable, such as ' ersa ' and ' washa.' He showed that the vowel is never omitted, though not always necessarily pro- nounced. Thus the group ' an-na-ap ' reads simply ' anap '; and he did not consider that the simple conson- ants i)recediiig its syllabic form altered the sound as Westergaard had suggested.^ Hincks adopted the eighty- two signs distinguislied l)y Westergaard, and attempted the identification of sixty-seven, or seven more than Westergaard. His identification of the three vowels, a, i and u,, was correc^t: and his limited number of con- sonants were also correct so far as they went, with the exception of 7>, which is the syllable ' pir ' (No. 40). He, however, allotted more than one sign to some of his consonants: thus k is j-epresented l)y three signs, t by

^ In his last paper he made several corrections in the values of the letters (TranM. Ii\ I, Acad. x\'\. 241) which Menaut has not taken into account in his Table. Lfs Etrituren cuuclformes (second ed. lS(h4), p. 138.

- J. 11. A. ♦V. vol. ix. lte]»rt, lS4(i, p. xvii.

^ Traiisaction$y\h,\^\). \'2'> i'8.