Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/410

Rh example, had laid down that the distinction between the consonantal sonnds is uniformly maintained; and the truth of this statement has been since confirmed. Rawlinson Avas, however, still of ophiion that 'the i^utturals and sibilants everywhere interchan<xe/ * There is the greatest possible difficulty in distinf^uishing between /*, d^ and t. L and v inten^hange.' It is evident also that he had still much to learn from his rival on the subject of the ideograms. It may be doubted indeed how far he had as yet apprehended the im})ortant place they occnpy. ' The names of the gods/ he says, 'are represented l)y signs which appear in scmie cases to be arbitrary monograms, but which are more uenerallv either the dominant sound of the name or its initial phonetic power.' He thought, for example, that the monogram for Bel was simply the letter ' H,' an idea that is wholly unfounded. lie is of course aware that there are many other ideom-ams besides those used for the gods, but he gives them no sort of prominence. lie, however, attributes an ideo- graphic origin to the syllables. ' Wlien a sign represents a syllable,' meaning ai)parently a compound syllable, 'I conjecture that the syllable in questi<m may have been the specific name of the objectt which the- sign was supposed to depict ; whilst in cases where a single alphabetical power appertains to the sign it would seem as if that power had been the dominant sound in the name of the object.' But this is a pui'ely academical question. The important point lay in pre- cisely the opposite direction, and attention had been already called to it by Ilincks. The peculiarity most necessary to em[)hasise is that in a vast majority of cases the pronunciation of the ideogram has no relation whatever to the name of the object it represents, nor, when it has a syllabic power, to the phonetic value of