142 REPORT—1857. 
first on the list, and all those after the ninth have no representatives at all in 
Sanskrit; and of the eight which have Sanskrit representatives, it is only-in the case 
of the numerals for “‘two” and “three” that they come anything like as near to the 
primitive Indo-European forms as the Classical or Teutonic representatives of these 
words. It thus appears that, contrary to what has been generally thought of late 
years, so far as the roots are concerned, the Greek, I.atin and Teutonic forms ap- 
proach the nearest to the primitive forms; while the Sanskrit deviates from them 
most. 
Even as respects the verbal terminations, where the Sanskrit is more to be de- 
pended on, it appears that Bopp has given more weight to its testimony than it 
deserves. He considers the ST of the second person, preserved in English and 
German to this day, and found also in the Latin and Armoric preterperfects, to con- 
tain an unorganic addition; whereas it appears from what has been said that mand 
st are the commencements of the primitive Indo-European pronouns of the first and 
second persons singular, It is now manifest that the original declension of the 
Latin present was reg-u-m, reg-i-st...reg-u-mus, reg-i-stis, The st was reduced tos 
in the singular and to ¢ in the plural; just as in the separate pronoun it was reduced 
to s in Greek and to ¢ in Latin. 
The increased value of the Greek and Latin forms given to them by this discovery 
renders it more than ever important to ascertain what they were in the earliest 
periods, It is known that while the Greek which has come down to us is written with 
an alphabet of twenty-four letters, the Greeks had at first only sixteen. It is there- 
fore a question of great interest what these sixteen letters were; and in connexion 
with this it has to be considered how the Greeks originally wrote words which were 
subsequently written with the newly introduced eight letters, That the Greeks 
derived their letters from the Phcenicians is generally admitted ; and both the names 
that are given to most of them and their forms prove that this is the case. The 
vowels of the original alphabet were the three Semitic breathings, Aleph, He, and 
Ayin. Vaw and Yod retained their original values, and represented the semivowels 
W and Y. Of the remaining seventeen Semitic letters there were six which repre- 
sented either combinations of consonants, or those strengthened consonants which 
were peculiar to the Semitic languages. These six were rejected by the Greeks. 
The remaining eleven with the three vowels and the two semivowels constituted the 
original alphabet. These were the first twenty letters of the full alphabet, with the 
exception of Z,H, @ and Z. An old Greek Scholiast expressly affirms that these 
were the sixteen original or Cadmean letters; and the fanciful theories of modern 
writers in England and on the Continent, in opposition to this statement, are un- 
worthy of the slightest attention. Two different sets of four letters were added to 
the original sixteen in different parts of Greece. In certain districts the four excepted 
letters given above were added ; but H was used as an aspirate, not as a long vowel. 
In other districts H was added as an aspirate, and along with it ©, ®, and X as com- 
pound aspirates, Prior to the introduction of H, its place was supplied by =, which 
was originally pronounced as a sibilant in the masculine article SO and many other 
words, and which afterwards retained its place in the word when an aspirate only 
was sounded there. This was the Say xi8dadoy of the fragment of Pindar. About 
the time when H was introduced as an aspirate, the semivowels lost their original 
values, except in the diphthongs; and were used to express modifications of the ori- 
ginal vowels E and O. The A¢olians retained the semivowel for W, as well as the 
new vowel which the other Greeks substituted for it; but neither this additional 
letter nor the Koppa ever formed part of the regular Greek alphabet. At the time 
when Z and & were first added to the alphabet, which must have been before 1000 
B.c., their values were oO and ox respectively. By combining together the letters 
added in different parts of Greece, an alphabet of twenty-two letters was formed. 
The values of Z and & having been changed from those just stated to do and xo, 
Simonides added a twenty-third letter, @o ; and he then completed the alphabet by 
adding the long @ at the end; changing at the same time the value of H from an 
aspirate to a long vowel. 
It appears from what has been said that in the earliest Greek writing the vowels 
E and O were used to express what were afterwards divided into two vowel sounds; ~ 
the former comprehending E and I, the latter O and Y. In like manner, the conso« 
