Page:History of Art in Phœnicia and Its Dependencies Vol 1.djvu/110

 9O HISTORY OF ART IN PIUKNICIA AND ITS to fill them in according to the sense of the phrase. Such a want of definition must have been very inconvenient to the Greeks. We know how great a part is played by vowels in their methods of derivation, in their declensions and conjugations. " To provide themselves with vowels the Greeks took the semi- vowels of the Phoenicians, and as even these were not enough. o ' they turned to the gutturals, so numerous in the Phoenician alphabet, and there only used to make the language clear and sonorous ; ioa and vav became I and Y ; alepk became A, ht E, hctk H, ain O. Over vav the Greeks seem to have hesitated; they took it up again and again as if they found it difficult to exhaust the possibilities of a letter whose value, as in Hebrew, was somewhat vague and floating. Thus we find that vav gave birth successively to the Greek digamma and upsilon, and in Latin to four letters : F, answering to the digamma, U, V, and Y." * Fi<;. 32. Fragment of a bronze cup French National Library. By these observations we are enabled to form a fair judgment of the services rendered to phonetic writing by the Greeks ; at the first attempt they solved a problem which had always puzzled the Semites. The latter tried now and then to note the vowel sounds with precision, but during the whole existence of their idiom they never quite succeeded ; the system of their primitive alphabet was, in fact, unequal to the task. The vowel-points of the rabbis of the sixth century of our era were applied, in a very artificial way, to a language which was then dead. We have complete proof that those signs give a false idea of the way the words of the Old Testament were pronounced at the time they were first written. 2 1 BERGER, L ' Ecriture et les Inscriptions scmitiques, p. 17. - Ibid.