Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/58

46 garden-sign inverted. In the Indian Asokan this letter sign for Sh or Ś is also inverted.

In the Brito-Phœnician cursive writing of Partolan and the Selsey coin of the fourth century B.C., both forms of the S occur. In the Pre-Roman Briton coins of the first and second centuries B.C., the simple S. only is found and in a cursive form which is identical with the modern S.

. This dental letter with its sound which freely interchanges in Sumerian and other Aryan languages with its fellow dental D, is found in its present-day form on Early Egyptian pottery of the first Dynasty onwards; and in its crook and arrow-head form ?, 𐋇 from the Pre-dynastic and twelfth Dynasty periods onwards. In the Cadmean and Greek only the T form occurs. In some early "Semitic" Phœnician inscriptions, for example the Moabite Stone and Baal Lebanon Bowl, the letter appears as a cross +, x.

The Sumerian parents of these forms appear to be found in two different syllabic signs with Ta [ ] and Ti [  ] as their front sounds.

The form appears to be derived from the Sumerian &#X122FB; with the value of Tar, defined as meaning "to Tear," disclosing the Sumerian source of that English word. On dropping its final consonant for alphabetic purposes, it becomes Ta or Ti and it would inevitably be written in rectangular form T for easy and speedy writing.

The Arrow-head form of the letter evidently comes from the selection of the somewhat similar Sumerian arrow-head sign to represent it alphabetically, as it begins with the same sound or letter. It has the phonetic value of Til