Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/482

460 derivation from the Mesopotamian cuneiform of the Persian, which is by far the simplest and the best understood of all the systems of its class, being purely phonetic and almost purely alphabetic. It contains about thirty-five signs of simple sounds, some of those for the consonants being partially of a syllabic character—that is to say, being different according as the consonant was to be followed by one or another vowel. In this simpler cuneiform are written the Achæmenidan inscriptions, of which we have already more than once had occasion to take notice, as preserving to us an Indo-European dialect. The history of its formation is unknown.

I have called the Achæmenidan cuneiform a partially syllabic mode of writing; and syllabic systems have played so important and prominent a part in the general history of writing—in the main, traceably as derivatives from methods of a different character—that it is necessary for us to pay them here a little special attention. A pure syllabic alphabet is one whose letters represent syllables, instead of articulations; which makes an imperfect phonetic analysis of words, not into the simple sounds that compose them, but into their syllabic elements; which does not separate the vowel from its attendant consonant or consonants, but denotes both together by an indivisible sign. Such an analysis is more natural and easy to make than one which distinguishes all the phonetic elements—especially in the case of languages of a simple structure, which do not favour difficult consonantal combinations, and therefore make up but a limited number of syllables. Many times, accordingly, when some race has made acquaintance with the art of writing as practised by another, and, instructed and incited by the latter's example, has set about representing its own spoken tongue by written signs, it has fallen first upon the syllabic method. One of the most noted alphabets of this kind is the Japanese kata-kana, or irofa (so called from the names of its first signs, like alphabet, from alpha, beta), to which we have already once had occasion to allude (in the ninth lecture  ): it was made out of fragments of Chinese characters, and contained forty-seven different signs, one for each of the