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Updated: May 21, 2025
The monograms represent in a brief way, by a wedge or a group of wedges, an entire word, often of two or three syllables, as Nebo, Babil, Merodach, etc. The determinatives mark that the word which they accompany is a word of a certain class, as a god, a man, a country, a town, etc. These last, it is probable, were not sounded at all when the word was read.
The meaning of each word may be well known; but the articulate sounds which were in the old times attached to them may be matter almost of conjecture. The Chaldaean characters are of three kinds-letters proper, monograms, and determinatives. With regard to the letters proper, there is nothing particular to remark, except that they have almost always a syllabic force.
No one of them reached the delicate and complex mechanism of internal and terminal inflexion; they were guiltless of the subtle processes by which Aryans and Semites expressed the finest shades of thought, and, by declining the substantive and conjugating the verb, subordinated the secondary to the principal idea; they did not understand how to unite, in an intimate and organic fashion, the root to its qualifications and determinatives, to the adjectives and phrases which give colour to a word, and indicate the precise rôle it has to play in the sentence in which it is used.
Another type of record is given by tablets such as that represented in Plate XIV. The tablet contains eight lines of well-written inscription, and consists apparently of twenty words, divided into three paragraphs. In this case there are no determinatives and no numerals; and it is possible that the document may be a contract, or perhaps an official proclamation.
It must not be supposed, however, that it was a mere whim which led the Egyptians to the use of this system of determinatives. There was sound reason back of it. It amounted to no more than the expedient we adopt when we spell "to," "two," or "too," in indication of a single sound with three different meanings.
Thus, the hawk denoted the sun, two water-plants meant Upper and Lower Egypt. Thirdly, hieroglyphics were used as determinatives. After proper names, they designated the sex; after the names of other classes, as animals, they specified the particular genus. Fourthly, the bulk of the hieroglyphs are phonetic. They stand for sounds.
* Another illustration of the plural number is seen in the sign Pau, on page 298, where the plural is indicated in the same manner. These determinatives are in themselves so interesting, as illustrations of the association of ideas, that it is worth while to add a few more examples.
By such slurring of sounds the syllabary is reduced far below its ideal limits; yet even so it retains three or four hundred characters. In point of fact, such a work as Professor Delitzsch's Assyrian Grammar presents signs for three hundred and thirty-four syllables, together with sundry alternative signs and determinatives to tax the memory of the would-be reader of Assyrian.
But this inherent conservatism was enormously aided, no doubt, by the fact that the Egyptian language, like the Chinese, has many words that have a varied significance, making it seem necessary, or at least highly desirable, either to spell such words with different signs, or, having spelled them in the same way, to introduce the varied determinatives.
The saffron-flower, various vessels, tripods, and balances, probably for the weighing of precious metals, occur most frequently among these determinatives. At Knossos this form of linear writing, Dr. Evans's Class A, appears to have had a comparatively short vogue.
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