6o Transactions of the Canadian Institute. [V'ol. VII. 



This it is necessary to state, because, while there are many in Canada 

 who can pass a pertinent opinion upon the Celtic side of the argument 

 presented in this paper, it is doubtful if there be one possessed of 

 sufficient knowledge of Basque to appreciate the simplest and most 

 evident coincidences between that language and the subject matter of 

 the inscriptions. The writer may, perhaps, be permitted to insert here 

 one of the many flattering testimonials that have come to him, alike 

 through printed publications and literary correspondence, as to his 

 proficiency in Basque studies. Mr. O'Shea, after other kind things, 

 remarks : " Our native Basque scholars cannot account for your thor- 

 ough acquaintance, not only with the modern forms of their language, 

 but w^ith that also of the primitive roots." And yet the writer was 

 once publicly taken to task in this Institute for presuming to know 

 Basque ! 



The old Turanian characters are not alphabetic, but constitute a 

 more or less imperfect syllabary, imperfect because in many cases one 

 character represents all the powers of a consonant, for instance, /^, 

 which may be ra, re, ri, ro or ru. In transliterating, the equivalents of 

 the characters are grouped, as nearly as convenient, first in the order 

 in which the characters appear in the inscriptions, and afterwards in 

 their order of modern reading. A table of phonetic values of the 

 characters, and a grammatical analysis of the texts, is appended to the 

 paper, so that those who are curious to examine the method of inter- 

 pretation may have every facility for so doing. Of the former there 

 are necessarily two parts, inasmuch as Dr. Bethencourt's Roman letters 

 on the Virgin of Candelaria present that Graeco-Roman aspect of the 

 Etruscan characters, which has misled almost, if not all, interpreters to 

 assign to them the phonetic equivalents of the European alphabet, 

 which naturally has led to no results. 



INSCRIPTION I. 



T/te Virgin of Candelaria. 



Line a. — ko i en tu po no en tu me ne ra au. 

 koi entu pono entu Menera au. 

 desire hear grief hear Menera this. 



" Let this (goddess) Menera hear the prayer, hear the sorrow ! " 



(The ornamental cross at the end of this line and in the following 

 lines is a mere punctuation mark). 



