of the Letters of the Hieroglyphic Alphabet. 183 
by which to describe both S and SH; and we are, therefore, necessarily depen- 
dent on the Coptic for the distinction of these letters, unless, indeed, an Egyp- 
tian letter should be found to correspond with p as well as with w. All this is 
on the supposition that the old Egyptians had a letter in their alphabet corres- 
ponding to our SH, which, however, is a matter for after investigation. That 
they had such a letter in the Roman, and probably in the Greek age, is obvious, 
for their q is derived from it; but it is another question whether they had any 
such character in the age of the papyri. 
The Hebrew words which have equivalent Egyptian ones etymologically 
connected with them are not numerous. There are some, however, as to which 
no doubt can reasonably be entertained; and some of these may be adduced as 
evidence to prove the powers of particular phonoglyphs, in conjunction with 
Egyptian transcriptions of Hebrew words, and Hebrew transcriptions of Egyptian 
ones. It is unnecessary, however, to make out any list of such words. 
There are many Egyptian words etymologically connected with Indo-Ger- 
manic ones of the same or similar meaning ; and this fact may possibly be useful 
in ascertaining the exact powers of some doubtful characters. Suppose, for 
example, that a series of Egyptian words, commencing with the same phono- 
glyphs, or with such as have been proved to be equivalent, are found to cor- 
respond with words of a given Indo-Germanic language, suppose the Latin, 
all of which begin with the same letter; suppose that another series be found 
to correspond to words beginning with a different Latin letter; and suppose 
that a character, the exact value of which is unknown, but is ascertained to be 
one of these two, commences a word of which the Latin equivalent is known ; 
we may safely pronounce the unknown character to belong to that set of 
phonoglyphs to which the initial letter of the corresponding Latin word was 
previously observed to correspond. Or if two phonoglyphs be observed to cor- 
respond to different Latin iitial letters (or even medial or final, though these 
are less to be depended on than initials), we may safely infer that they are 
not truly equivalent, though they may, perhaps, be represented by the same 
Coptic letter. 
It is not necessary that all the words of the series be found in the same Indo- 
Germanic language. The law of the initial mutes, discovered by Grimm, ena- 
bles us to transfer an equivalent word in one of these languages to another. 
