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Updated: May 27, 2025
While it seeks to explain the syllabic values of the signs on the general principle that they represent elements of Babylonian words, truncated in this fashion in order to answer to the growing need for phonetic writing of words for which no ideographs existed, it is difficult to imagine, as Halévy's theory demands, that the "ideographic" style, as found chiefly in religious texts, is the deliberate invention of priests in their desire to produce a method of conveying their ideas that would be regarded as a mystery by the laity, and be successfully concealed from the latter.
As has been observed, there is no R in the Cherokee language, written or spoken, and as for the middle initial of Mr. Seward's name, H., there being, of course, no initial in a syllabic alphabet, the translator, who probably did not know what it stood for, was compelled to omit it. It was in the year 1821 that the American Cadmus completed his alphabet.
Having once been adopted by the early Elamites, it continued to be used by them for long periods with but small change or modification. Employed far from the centre of Sumerian civilization, its development was slow, and it seems to have remained in its ideographic state, while the system employed by the Sumerians, and adopted by the Semitic Babylonians, was developed along syllabic lines.
But this is not the end, for other consonantal sounds may be associated in the syllables in such combinations as bad, bed, bar, bark, cab, etc. As each of the other twenty odd consonantal sounds may enter into similar combinations, it is obvious that there are several hundreds of fundamental syllables to be taken into account in any syllabic system of writing.
Quantitative or accentual metrics would be as artificial in French as stress metrics in classical Greek or quantitative or purely syllabic metrics in English. French prosody was compelled to develop on the basis of unit syllable-groups. Assonance, later rhyme, could not but prove a welcome, an all but necessary, means of articulating or sectioning the somewhat spineless flow of sonorous syllables.
It is a general favourite, and is frequently heard not only in the public religious services and at the family devotions, but often the forest's stillness is broken by its hopeful, cheering notes, as at his lonely toil the Christian hunter strides along. Mr Evans printed his first copies of it in syllabic characters on birch bark. But how did it get here? and who was the sweet singer?
Let us take for example a few of the b sounds. It has been explained that the basis of the Assyrian written character is a simple wedge-shaped or arrow-head mark. Variously repeated and grouped, these marks make up the syllabic characters.
The lack of fixed syllabic quantity is just what I emphasize. This lack makes definite beat impossible: or at least it makes it absurd to attempt to scan English verse by feet. The proportion of 'irregularities' and 'exceptions' becomes painful to the student and embarrassing to the professor. He is put to fearful straits to explain his prosody and make it fit the verse.
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