Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/55

Rh 

Early Egypt, if it be not a form of the allied guttural Kh, as noted under H. . This consonantal letter has obviously its parent in the Sumerian early cursive looped or squared diagram of a Foot &#xF200B;, &#xF2182; ?, ? with value of Ra, "to run or go," as this form approximates that found throughout most of the alphabets. The Cadmean form of P for R, already occurs along with the squared Sumerian form on the First Dynasty pottery in Egypt (see Plate II), if it is not P. In the Brito-Phœnician of Partolan the ligatured form of the R occurs as a curved stroke, as in the Indian Asokan and Hindi.

Sumerian possesses two sibilant S, sound-signs, namely the soft dental S and the rough aspirated Sh or Ś, which latter has dropped out of the later European alphabets, which use instead the two separate letters SH,. The third S, of the Semites, the so-called Tsade of the Hebrews, and transliterated as Ts or Ṣ, is regarded as a bi-form of Z, like the French çedilla. It is occasionally used in spelling Sumerian names by the later Babylonian and Assyrian scribes, but it was probably absent in Sumerian.

These two S, sound-signs, the simple and the aspirate, freely interchange between themselves and with the other sibilant Z, in Sumerian and Akkadian, and this is presumably the reason why considerable confusion occurs in regard to the forms of these S, letters in the earlier alphabetic scripts.

Three main types of S, letters occur in the Cadmean and "Semitic" Phœnician and Greek, and significantly they are also found in the Early Egyptian signaries (see Plate II).

The Sumerian source of the simple soft sibilant letter S,