519 
lar, which was hwéku at a more ancient period than aku. It 
also commenced the first person singular of all these tenses of 
verbs which had preformatives. The preformative of this 
person is hwa before a consonant, and the simple digamma 
before a vowel. Thus, ‘I burned,’ which in the later Assy- 
rian was simply dsrup, was originally Awdsrup. ‘I sat,’ 
which was in late Assyrian éstb, was originally hwisib. This 
was probably pronounced in the same manner as the third 
person yisib, ‘he sat. At any rate these two forms were 
represented alike to the eye, whether they were distinguished 
or not to the ear. The interchange of the sounds hw and y 
was not confined to the preformatives. The affix of the first 
person singular, which was originally hwa, was written ya in 
most Assyrian inscriptions of late date. It is true that in 
the great majority of instances where it is so written it is pre- 
ceded by i; but the fact that the affix had become ya is 
shown by the abbreviated form which we meet with when 
a consonant precedes it. ‘My father,’ without the case- 
ending, is written abz, as well as aba. ‘The former could not 
be a contraction from abhwa, but necessarily supposes a form 
abya. In the Semitic languages previously known, 7 is 
almost universal. The Ethiopic, however, has ya; and this 
is occasionally used in Arabic. None of these go back to the 
primitive form with the digamma. 
«¢ A question now arises,—Is this hwa, which was, as we 
have seen, at the same time the preformative of the first per- 
son singular in verbs, and the affix of the same person after 
nouns, in the most ancient period of the Assyrian language, 
an abbreviation of Awaku, the most ancient form of the inde- 
pendent pronoun. At the first glance, one would be tempted 
to say,—‘ Of course; can it be doubted?’ And if we had 
merely the Assyrian and other Semitic languages, and the 
‘Indo-European languages, to guide us in our investigations, it 
would, I grant, be unnatural to doubt it. We have, how- 
er, other grounds on which we can form an opinion. We 
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