Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/74

60 R were presumably too few to form separate groups. The position of the R immediately after the Q suggests that the sound of that letter was guttural — the guttural R. The concluding letter Z, the sibilant, appears to have been perhaps regarded by the Romans as a dental, and significantly the Z sign is often rendered by the dental D by Egyptologists and Tch by others.

This fixed alphabetic order was, no doubt, conduced to by the early practice of giving numeral values to the letters according to their relative position in the alphabet, thus A = 1, B = 2 and so on; and this practice was adopted from the Phœnicians along with the Sumerian letters by the Semites, as seen, for instance, in the order of the books of the Old Testament, and especially in the 119th Psalm. Here it is noteworthy that the Sumerian Ā sign possessed the value of "One" in the Sumerian, long anterior to the formation of the Cadmean and "Semitic" Phœnician alphabets; and similarly A had also this numeral value in Egyptian. But none of the other Sumerian signs which are disclosed to be the parents of the alphabetic letters appear to have possessed numeral values in Sumerian except a very few, and these are not according to their "Phœnician" values, thus I = 5 and U = 10.