Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/186

 the equivalent combination of alphabetic ones, just as the Greek abbreviations which are so puzzling to some persons, either in the manuscripts or in the Aldine and other old editions of the classics, give place at the present day to the simple letters. And just as some persons saw considerable advantage in the use of Greek abbreviations, every Egyptologist will tell you that, each syllabic character being necessarily confined to a limited number of words, he is able to detect at a glance over a page the presence of a word he is looking for. But syllabic signs were not used, any more than Greek abbreviations, in consequence of a want of signs to express purely alphabetic values. In this matter Egyptian orthography differs essentially from Chinese or Assyrian. It may, however, be objected that Egyptian writing admits a certain number of ideographic signs commonly called determinatives, which are not pronounced; a sign, for instance, representing two legs is placed after words signifying motion. But if we compare our own writing either with Sanskrit or with ancient Greek or Latin manuscripts, we shall find plenty of ideographic signs in it. What else are notes of exclamation or of interrogation? What are inverted commas and vacant spaces between the words? Capital letters are to this day determinatives of proper names in English and French, and of substantives in German orthography. Our ideography is undoubtedly much simpler than the Egyptian, but it is quite as real. An