Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/45

Rh barred pictogram of Kha, with the phonetic variants of Kha, Khi, Khu, Xa, Xe, Xi, Xu, Gan, Kan and Qan, meaning literally and picturing "a Can" on an X-shaped stand (see Plate I). The letter H is taken from the top limb of this sign, and the letter X from its stand portion, whilst the K, Kh, G and Q are dialectic variations in its phonetic value.

We now see how throughout the Kha series of words in Sumerian, as in the later Akkad and Aryan languages, the initial K tends to drop out, leaving the H as the initial of the word. Thus the old tribal name of the Goths spelt by the Sumerians and "Hitt-ites" as Khat-ti or Khad-ti, the "Catti" of the pre-Roman Briton coins (and also spelt Kud-ti and Guti), became by the dropping out of its initial K, "Hat-ti," the source of the modern name "Hitt-ite." And by the further dropping out of the H—a change also occasionally occurring in Sumerian, Egyptian and modern Aryan dialects, e.g., in cockneyisms—it became Atti and Att on the ancient Briton coins.

This dropping of the initial K in Kh was so common, not only in later Sumerian and Babylonian but in Egyptian, that most Assyriologists and Egyptologists write most of these Kh initial letters habitually as H or H. Thus the great Babylonian King Khammu-rabi, of the famous Hittite or Gothic Law-code borrowed by Moses, is regularly called "Hammurabi," and so on.

A similar barred Sumerian sign with more than one cross-bar (see p. 32) with the value Khun is in series with the multibarred form of the latter, as sometimes found in Cadmean and "Semitic" Phœnician, which possibly may be derived from this syllabic sign used alphabetically as Kh or H.