Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 5.djvu/23

 dâ, dah, dakh, gâ, gah, gakh, gâ, gah, gakh. gh. k. m.  n, v, w, û, ô, r, l.  y, î, ê, d, g, g.

From this list it is easy to see the confusion produced by the letter s being exactly like the letter  y doubled, and by the letter  sh being identical with a compound of  y and  â; and there are, in fact, some compounds of two letters which have from ten to fifteen sounds in common use, besides others which might possibly occur. If it be further considered that there are only three letters (which are also consonants, as in most Semitic languages) to represent five long vowels, and that there are probably five short vowels to be understood, the difficulty of reading Pahlavi correctly may be readily imagined.

When Pahlavi writing was in common use this difficulty was probably no more felt by the Persians, than the complexity of Chinese characters is felt as an evil by a Chinese mandarin, or the corrupt system of English orthography by an educated Englishman. It is only the foreigner, or learner, who fully appreciates the difficulty of understanding such cumbrous systems of writing.

With regard, however, to their Huzvâris logograms the Persians seem to have experienced more difficulty. As the actual sounds of these Semitic words were rarely pronounced, in consequence of their Pâzand equivalents being substituted in reading, there must have been some risk of their true pronunciation being forgotten. That this risk was understood by the Persians, or Parsis, is proved by the existence of the Huzvâris-Pâzand glossary already described, which was evidently compiled as a record both of the pronunciation and meaning of the Huzvâris logograms. But its compilation does not appear to have been undertaken until the true pronunciation of some of these logograms had been already lost. Thus, although the traditional readings of most of the Semitic portion of the Huzvâris can be readily traced to well-known Chaldee words, there are yet many other such readings which are altogether inexplicable as Semitic