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The word may also be rendered "dreams". For this rendering of the verb e-de, for which Dr. Brünnow, Classified List, p. 327. For not only are the first two elements of the Sumerian name identical with those of the Semitic Ut-napishtim, but the names themselves are equated in a later Babylonian syllabary or explanatory list of words.
For while the Babylonians and Assyrians rested content with their elaborate syllabary, a nation on either side of them, geographically speaking, solved the problem, which they perhaps did not even recognize as a problem; wrested from their syllabary its secret of consonants and vowels, and by adopting an arbitrary sign for each consonantal sound, produced that most wonderful of human inventions, the alphabet.
At three he learned his letters, having insisted upon being taught to read and being allowed to share the lessons of an elder sister. Immediately thereafter he was discovered with her story book, spelling out its words by the aid of the syllabary or "caton" which he had propped up before him and was using as one does a dictionary in a foreign language.
KOBODAISHI, most holy of Buddhist priests, and founder of the Shingon- sho which is the sect of Akira first taught the men of Japan to write the writing called Hiragana and the syllabary I-ro-ha; and Kobodaishi was himself the most wonderful of all writers, and the most skilful wizard among scribes.
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.
It is plain, therefore, that we have here a monument testifying to the rule of Ramses II., but a monument which was erected by natives of the country to a native divinity. For a while the hieroglyphic writing of Egypt had taken the place formerly occupied by the cuneiform syllabary of Babylonia, and Egyptian culture had succeeded in supplanting that which had come from the East.
The culture, including the religion of Babylonia, is likewise a Semitic production, and since Assyria received its culture from Babylonia, the same remark holds good for entire Mesopotamia. The cuneiform syllabary is largely Semitic in character.
It was a vast improvement on the old syllabary, but it had its drawbacks. Perhaps it had been made a bit too simple; certainly it should have had symbols for the vowel sounds as well as for the consonants. Nevertheless, the vowel-lacking alphabet seems to have taken the popular fancy, and to this day Semitic people have never supplied its deficiencies save with certain dots and points.
*The Genji Monogatari by Murasaki Shikibu, and the Makura Soshi by Sei Shonagon. Japanese Literature, by W. G. Aston. With the Heian epoch is connected the wide use of the phonetic script known as kana, which may be described as a syllabary of forty-seven symbols formed from abbreviated Chinese ideographs.
Possibly that sense is born of the feeling that the Cretan linear script, for example, or the Cyprian syllabary, looks very odd and outlandish. The critic's imagination boggles at the idea of an epic written in such scripts. In that case his is not the scientific imagination; he is checked merely by the unfamiliar.
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