Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/47

Rh This letter-sign occurs in Egypt from the first Dynasty onwards, and in Cadmean, and is reversed in "Semitic" Phoenician, Etruscan, and has both forms in Iberian (see Plate I).

This hard front guttural sound and sign, as we have seen under the letter H, is much intermixed and blended with the other gutturals Kh, X, Q and the hard guttural G, in Sumerian as also throughout the ancient alphabets. Thus the name of the famous old Hittite capital, now spelt "Carchemish" after its old Testament form, was spelt by the Sumerians and Akkads variously as Karkamiś, Gargamiś and Qarqamiś, and by the Egyptians K-r-k-m-ś and Q-r-q-m-ś And see Ki, Qi or Gi," the Earth" in Dictionary, Plate V and text. The parent of this letter K is now seen to be the, Sumerian syllabic Kad, Kat, kit, "a Coat," picturing presumably the diagram of a coat with its collar, sleeves and skirt, and from this syllabic name the final consonant has dropped out, leaving the sound of the sign as Ka or Ki (see Plate I, col. i). And significantly this Kad or Kat "Coat" sign is also spelt in Sumerian Gad, Gat and Qad, Qat just as the Phoenicians spelt the name of their great Atlantic port outside the Strait of Gibraltar variously "Kadesh" and "Gadesh" the modern Cadiz. The Sumerian parent of this letter K thus appears to be one of the very few bi-consonantal signs used for the formation of an alphabetic letter, the great majority and almost all of the consonantal Sumerian signs for alphabetic letters consisting of a single consonantal value followed by the vowel necessary to sound it. Whereas, on the contrary,