Page:Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal Vol 7, Part 2.djvu/68

640 diacritical marks; of these the jig the heat determined, being found applied to almost all the consonants in the form of a small stroke crossing the letter. The is uncertain; it may be a prolongstioi below in the r,—a foot stroke or mdtra. The e, I judge from the Mardicyala inscription, to be a detached stroke behind and above; in a few cases only joined. The u may be the loop so often seen at the foot of the writtenletters. &e. I feel it to be a little premature thus to assign sounds without any positive authority: but it was from a similar assumption of the value of its vowel marks, that I was led to the discovery of the Indian pillar alphabet. With regard to the consonants, I ought perhaps to follow the order of the Hebrew alphabet, but as the langsage to be expressed is allied to the Sanskrit, it may be more convenient to analyse them in the order of the latter. i, ka. This letter on further scrutiny I find invariably to represent x; and its place is never taken on the coins by i as I fermerly sup.. posed. It occurs also with the vowel affix i as sLi; also, but seldom, with the si, as kw; and with the subjoined r as h kra. In the compounds, kia, ku, a form is adopted more like the Hebrew g p (quere ‘Ti, : there are two or threeexainp1es in support of it., kh, is limited as such to the name of Aatimachow-_but I find it also representing the g in Abagasoei. In the written tablets we have c and S and P seemingly identical with it, yet the latter with the vowel 1, f, is tiled in some places for dlii (intended for the inflected t. ?)—.There is no small affinity between I’, , and ‘, Q, the kh of the old Sanskrit written invertedly. , 1. 3 , g orgh i—I place these forms here because they occur so. veral times in the tablets and they bear some resemblance to the g of the Pehievi. Of the Sánskrit palatials neither the Greek nor the Chaldaic alphabets contain any proper examples—the cli and j are modified to z and ti— which letters we must expect to find substituted for the Sanskrit class ‘ r ‘a. r, r, clux , ciJia. The first of these forms is found at the close of a series of words terminating each in the same vowel inflection, ‘,e; which makes me suppose it to be the Sanskrit conjunction cha, uniting a string of epithets in the locative case. As yet I have no stronger argument for its adoption. , or ‘I, Jo (tsa?). The form of the Chaldaic te, agrees well with the first; indeed in many coins of Az.. the Bactriau form is identical with