Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/37

Rh in the minuscule from a, in which the angle becomes a curve or loop.

The normal two-legged A is found in the Cadmean Phœnician and generally throughout most of the alphabets. In the Gothic Runes, where this letter is significantly called Āss or Asa, i.e. "the Lord" or "Ace" or The One (presumably for the commercial value of A for " One "), its common form consists of the two angular wavelet lines, the one below the other and connected by a perpendicular in F fashion (see Plate I, col. 18), In Ogam it is a single upright stroke I, presumably from its numerical value, or with its base-line forms a cross. In Old Persian where the letter is turned on its side the three parallel wedges are preserved in the Hindi and seemingly also in the Gothic black letter. The Indian Asokan is derived from the lateral form of the late Sumerian sign turned on its side, and it also exists in the reversed or retrograde form (the so-called Kharoshthi script) in those inscriptions of the emperor Asoka intended for Semitic-speaking subjects on the North-Western frontiers of his great Indian empire where the letters are written retrograde, but in the same Aryan language, just as the Aryan Sumerians and Phœnicians wrote their "Akkad" inscriptions for Semitic subjects.

The Ā in the Brito-Phœnician of Partolan like a shallow tailed U (col. 16) resembles the corresponding sign in "Semitic," Phœnician derived obviously from the Sumerian inverted crescent sign for A or Ā, see under U; and the A or a retains this form in the Syriac, Partolan having been born as he tells us in Syria-Cilicia.

The absence of this Water pictogram for A in Egyptian hieroglyphs and in hieratic writing is obviously owing to Water not having been ordinarily known by its Sumerian