Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/389

360 'house,' 'god,' 'man' (two), and anotlier sign for ' king ' not previously recognised Ijv Grotefend. He also pointed out two signs foi* the plural. (December 18403.)

In his paper of January 1847 he increases his list of primary signs to ninety-live, and he analyses the remain- ing characters found in the East India House inscription pubhshed by Mr. Fisher in 1807. He thinks he has been able to assign values to a hundred and ninety-nine of these, and to attach them to some one or other of the ninety-five primary values to which, in his opinion, they corresponded. If this attem])t had been successful, he would have arrived at the values of the whole of the two hundred and eighty-seven siii^ns in Mr. Fisher's list, and a few others in addition. But the paper in other respects indicates a retrograde tendency. 'The language,' he says, ' has been brought to exhibit a much s^reater similarity to the Semitic ones than I had at first supposed.' He accordingly abandons the ' transcription of Babylonian words intoEoman characters' and assimi- lates them to the letters hi the Hebrew alphabet.^ He distributes the signs into classes according as he supposes them to be labials, gutturals, dentals, nasals. Unguals and sibilants. He does not attempt to subdivide the classes into surds and sonants, but he separates each class into two divisions, according as he considers that the consonant is followed by e (: skeva) or by a {-pathac). ' Values different from these are annexed to the characters which admit them.' In so far as each sio-n is insepar- ably attached to one or other vowel the system remains syllabic; but his new table exhibits a stronof desire to revert, if possible^ to an alphabetical system in cor- respondence with the Hebrew. His study of the in- scriptions at Van enabled him, even at this early date,

' Tranmctions, ib. p. 249.