form of syllabic writing, independently devel oped in all likelihood, was that preserved in the cuneiform inscriptions of the valley of Mesopotamia. The nation using it was known as the Accadian, but their relationship has not been ascertained. Some faint resemblances to the Finnish and allied tongues have been pronounced inconclusive by the best authorities. The cuneiform writing is extremely difficult from the absence of fixity in the sounds represented. Thus, a sign may mean either a closed or an open syllable containing the vowel (1. c. one ending with a consonant or a vowel), and it may convey quite different consonantal values. For example, the sign for the syllable ku stands also for the syllables Ins, pun, and dur; the sign for li may also be pronounced gip and him (Friedrich Milner). With such obstacles as this to contend with, and the language and all its descendants being extinct, it is one of the marvels of modern science that the study of the cuneiform inscriptions has conquered so wide a field of positive results as has been the case.
Ancient analysis of speech to its ultimate phonetic elements—in other words, an approach toward an alphabet of letters—was first achieved in ancient Egypt, but, as we shall soon see, not there in its purity. The Egyptians began with picture-writing, and soon advanced to syllabic writing. But, unlike the Chinese, the spirit of their language did not lead them to stop there. The ancient Coptic was a language of inflection (see p. 52); it possessed a series of syllables which served to express the relations of ideas and the position of each idea with reference to others. It was also a language possessing many homophones. By the latter it offered the facility for extending the signification of the figure representing a sound. By the former certain sounds were recognized as belonging to the formal parts of the language, and soon became separated from the others. To quote the example offered by Prof. F. Muller, we may take the word for "brother," in Coptic son: sister ; brothers ; the brother ; the sisters ; my brother ; thy brother ; his brother ; our brother, etc. These suffixes and prefixes are repeated with every word as the sense demands, and the ancient scribe would soon be led to have separate figures not only for the syllables' pa, Ea, an, but for the single elements 1, u, k, thus making a long stride toward a true alphabet. He would find that the same sign would answer for the sound a whether it was a prefix or a suffix, whether it was a whole word or a mere particle added or inserted.
To this extent the Egyptians had carried their system of writing at an early date, and its different steps are plainly perceptible in their inscrip tions and manuscripts. The figure of a house, in Coptic per, stands for
the syllable per; the figure of a ram, ba, for the syllable ba ; and so on. This is indeed only a kind of syllabic pictnre-writing. But in the same inscription we may find true alphabetic writing, as when the figure or symbol of an owl, in Coptic stands for the letter 7n; that of the mouth, ro, for the letter r; of the lion, laboi, for the letter /; and the Afexican or ancient Mexicans had carried their system almost to the same extent. They not only had pictures expressing certain syllables, but some defining particular letters, and they combined them to spell words. Thus, the Aztec hieroglyph of the great plateau of Apan was the sinuous line for water, in Nahuatl all, or, the termination dropped, simply a, and the figure of a banner, fiandi or fictiz. Here the first repre sented a single letter, the latter a closed syllable.
But neither the Egyptians nor the Aztecs learned to avail themselves of the full advantages of the system which they had carried to this point with such inventive skill. Alongside of these true phonetic elements they retained many ideograms, and even actual pictures ; they made use of " determinatives," as described in the Chinese system (see p. 9i); and they did not confine one sign to one sound, and thus carry a fixed phonetic principle through all their system of writing. It was reserved for other groups of nations, under the stimulus of widely-different linguistic struc ture, to overcome these difficulties, and to give to the method of recording thought its final requirements to adapt it to the needs of civilization.
Early of these groups in point of time were the Semitic nations, especially those of Babylonia and Phmnicia. There can be no reasonable doubt that their oldest scripts were learned from " the wis dom of the Egyptians" and were syllabic in nature. But as such they were by no means suited to the genius of the Semitic languages. These have certain traits in which they stand alone among all languages of men. They are built on a series of so-called " verbal roots," each of which consists of three consonantal sounds. The changes of meaning, which in most Aryan tongues are obtained by affixes, are in the Semitic dialect produced by altering the•vowel inserted between these three con sonants. To show this by an example, we may take the three consonants In the Semitic dialects this arrangement conveys the idea of " writing " or the act " to write," indefinitely. Placing the vowel a after each consonant, ka /a ba, it means, "lie has written ;" substituting an u for the first ku /a have " it has been written ;" lengthen ing the first a and altering the last to an n, ka /a bu, gives the present participle "writing ;" and so on.