232 RE:P0RTS on INVliSTlGATlONS AND PROJECTS. 



PHILOLOGY. 



Hempl, George, Leland Stanford, jr. University, California. Grant No. 

 629. Researches on the origin and nature of Runic inscriptions and on 

 the Etruscan language. $1,000 



Professor Hempl's first grant was used in defraying traveling expenses 

 while searching for Runic material in Europe in the summer and fall of 

 1906 and the summer of 1907. The second grant has been partly expended 

 for books and material. 



Dr. Hempl's former report recorded : 



(i) The discovery that in many early Runic records a system of writing 

 was employed that was transitional between syllabic and alphabetic. To this 

 Dr. Hempl has recently given the name "penalphabetic," because it is almost 

 alphabetic, 



(2) The consequent solution of many hitherto unread Runic texts, which 

 give new information as to earliest Germanic speech. 



(3) The discovery of a new Old-Germanic language, namely, Burgundian. 



(4) The detection of errors in the current understanding of Venetic let- 

 ters, and success, therefore, in reading Venetic, v/hich turned out to be a 

 conservative Italic dialect, closely related to Latin. 



(5) The successful effort to read Etruscan, and the discovery that this 

 language was a very radical member of the group to which Latin and Ve- 

 netic belonged. 



His second report adds: 



(6) The discovery that the ancient Cretan pictographic inscriptions repre- 

 sent a system of writing in which each device stands for the initial sound or 

 sounds of the Greek name for the object represented, the system being thus 

 one of crude syllabic writing. 



(7) The discovery that the language employed in these inscriptions was 

 Greek, and Greek of the variety known to us as Attic. 



(8) The consequent establishment of the fact that the remarkable ancient 

 Cretan civilization, the remains of which have been laid bare by Evans and 

 other archeologists during the past ten years, and which so long antedates 

 what we know as Greek civilization, was itself Greek. This puts written 

 Greek some 1,500 years farther back than the oldest records hitherto read — 

 farther back, indeed, than the date now generally (perhaps erroneously) 

 assigned to the oldest Sanskrit. 



(9) The discovery that the celebrated Phsestos disk is written in a highly 

 developed system of syllabic writing, and that the language employed is 

 Ionic Greek. 



( 10) Success in working out, in much detail, the phonological, monopho- 

 logical, and accentual laws of the Etruscan language. 



Some record of Dr. Hempl's Runic and Burgundian studies will be found 

 in: 



(i) An article in the Nation, April 23, 1908. 



