312 Rev. Dr. Watt on the different Kinds of Cuneiform Writing 
As far as I can understand this passage, if the four assumptions contained in 
it with regard to the practice of the ancient insculptor were conceded, a modern 
decipherer could, by the aid of rules directly thence deduced, make out any pro- 
posed name whatever from any assigned group of sufficient length, belonging to 
the more general kind of writing referred to, or its subordinate species. He 
could, for instance, through the first article, get rid of the opposition of any of 
the medial characters whose powers, determined by other names, would not 
answer in this one, by stripping them here of those powers and degrading them 
for this occasion to the rank of mutes;* or he could, through the third, evade 
the disturbing effects of any initial or final elements that were, in like manner, 
unsuited to his purpose, by reducing them to euphonic redundants, unconnected 
with the essential parts of the name to be expressed. Moreover, if he should, 
besides removing the obstruction of refractory powers, want to get others in their 
place, he could, with the help of the parenthetical part of the second article, 
virtually convert them into any vowel-letters he chose; or, by means of the 
fourth, transform them into other consonants of the requisite powers. I do not 
suppose that our author has, in his own practice, pushed those rules to the full 
extent to which they might be carried; but still, I must observe, it is by the 
application of a theory to extreme cases that its validity is to be tested. I may, 
perhaps, have mistaken the meaning of part of the above passage ; and, therefore, 
would not press too closely the consequences drawn from that part; but, at all 
events, the rest of it, which is clearly intelligible, yields quite too great a latitude 
of choice to a decipherer to admit of his analysis of any specimen of writing sub- 
jected to such treatment being of the slightest value. 
* T understand the terms ‘ mute’ and ‘ sonant’ consonants, in the first article of the statement 
above referred to, in their ordinary acceptation of consonants that are passed over in silence, or 
are uttered in the pronunciation of the words in which they occur. The technical distinction, 
somewhat similarly expressed in Sanscrit Grammar, of letters into ‘surd’ and ‘sonant,’ appears to 
be inapplicable ; as the classification arising from the former distinction is, in the specified 
article, expressly limited to consonants, while that depending on the latter one includes vowels 
(see Wilkins’s Sanscrit Grammar, p. 16); and, indeed, in the sense in which the Hindu distinction 
is made,—namely, of letters that can or cannot be audibly uttered without the aid of others joined 
to them,—there are in reality no sonants but the vowels, and all the consonants are surds. In 
the case, however, of a sentence, of which the purport is not precisely fixed by means of an 
example, it is very possible that I may have misconceived the author’s meaning. 
