518 
Mownpay, JUNE 22np, 1857. 
JAMES HENTHORN TODD, D.D., Prestpenr, 
in the Chair. 
Tue President communicated the following paper by the Rev. 
Edward Hincks, on the Personal Pronouns in their most an- 
cient forms :— 
“‘T have treated of the personal pronouns in a paper-read 
before the British Association in 1852, and more fully ina 
paper read before the Royal Irish Academy on the 26th of 
June, 1854, and printed in the twenty-third volume of the 
Transactions. Further researches have confirmed to their ful- 
lest extent all that I stated in the latter paper; but they 
have also enabled me to go further back into the history of 
these pronouns, so as to explain the forms in which they ap- 
pear in the Hebrew future, as it is called, and in the four 
Assyrian tenses, which I mentioned at the close of my last 
paper as denoting transient action. 
«The Assyrian pronoun of the first person singular is 
anaku, corresponding to the Hebrew anéki; and this is in 
reality, as I stated, a verb an combined with the true pronoun 
aku or 6ki. I have observed, however, that wherever the 
long o occurs in Hebrew, a contraction has taken place.* It 
represents awa or ahwa; the two vowels being separated by 
a sound similar to that represented by the AXolic digamma, 
and which ceased to be expressed in the later Assyrian, and 
in Hebrew, where a contraction did not take place, precisely 
as it ceased to be expressed in classical Greek. This digamma 
originally commenced the pronoun of the first person singu- 
* So in the feminine plural. The Hebrew pj, 6¢, is in Assyrian dhwat, with the 
case-ending. For example, the genitive is—m. s, danni, f. s. dannati, m. p. danniti, 
f. p. danndhwati. 
