1890-91.] SIBKRIAN INSCRIPTIONS. 265 



scriptions is that investigators have persisted in affih'ating the unknown 

 with the unknown. The language of the Sinaitic inscriptions, of the 

 apocryphal Iberic and Scythic, of the Parthian, of those of western Asia 

 Minor, of the Etruscan, and of the Hunnic, is as much a mystery as that 

 of the Siberian. To draw attention to resemblances among these modes 

 of writing is perfectly justifiable and scientific, and, in the course of time, 

 may lead to large results. But, in the meantime, what is wanted is a 

 standpoint of known phonetic equivalents of Turanian characters. Inas- 

 much as my process has been for some time before the public, and as the 

 full statement of it, as regards the Siberian characters, is soon to appear 

 in the work already referred to, it would be idle and superfluous to reca- 

 pitulate these within the necessarily brief limits of this paper '■*. The 

 language of the inscriptions being a priori unknown, the history they 

 record a blank, without the aid of a bilingual, however brief, no guess 

 work, ever so brilliant, could lead the student to a consistent lexical and 

 grammatical interpretation of them in a well known oriental tongue. 

 That tongue is the Japanese, in a dialect varying but little from the 

 written or literary speech of the present day. The suggestions of Strah- 

 lenberg and other writers, that the Siberian characters are related to 

 those of the Sinaitic and Etruscan, of the Parthian and Devanagari, in- 

 scriptions, and that they were carried by the Kitan in a modified form 

 into Corea, are justified by the linguistic and historical facts which all of 

 these documents unfold, when the key that unlocks the door of long 

 Siberian silence is applied in turn to them. 



Mr. Aspelin counts 42 distinct characters in the inscriptions examined 

 by him. Had he distinguished all the varieties of form presented, he could 

 have made them much more numerous, but as no special law can be 

 found to govern the variations, the number must practically be much 

 reduced, especially, also, as they are found to be not alphabetic but 

 syllabic, and to dispense with the vowel notation common to the Lat 

 Indian and Corean systems. A careful analysis of several inscriptions in 

 which proper names are repeated reveals the fact that characters of radi- 

 cally diverse origin were phonetically interchangeable, a fact which 

 simplifies the reading of such documents, but which robs the syllabary 

 of that nice distinction of vowel values which the numerous symbols 

 would lead one to expect, and which would render definite the pronunci- 

 ation of the words they compose^". An instance of this is the com- 

 monly recurring word for a king, which, judging from present usage 

 should be mi-to or mi-kado, the sublime porte, or honourable door. In 

 point of fact, the first character which represents it, as a rule, has not 

 the phonetic value of mi, me, which is set forth by a different symbol, 

 and the second, of varying form, may as often be read ta, and ie, as to or 



