534 Professor Rasx’s Remarks on the Zend Language. 
language to which they originally belonged had once been current among 
their ancestors. 
In addition, I shall only mention two other circumstances, which seem 
very powerfully to support the old hypothesis, that the Zend was the real 
language of ancient Media. The first is the language of the cuneiform 
Inscriptions of Persepolis, as far as discovered by Professor GrorerenD. I 
will readily allow, with Baron De Sacy, in his letter to Miuurn, that the 
discovery is not yet completed; but as far as we may judge from the 
features of an embryo, it looks very like the language of Zoroaster; and 
where it is very dissimilar, I am inclined to suspect some mistake ; for 
instance, in the inscription from Nizsuur, tom. ii, plate 24, quoted in 
Be.iino’s Account of Grorerenp’s Discovery,* 1 doubt the correctness 
of the genitive plural in ¢, ch, 4, 0, which is not Zend, and suppose the true 
reading should be a, », a, m, which (anam) is the usual termination of 
genitive plurals of the first class of nouns. The two new letters there 
restored, viz. n and m, would also bring the last word of this inscription, 
d, Ih, é, 0, ch, 6, sh, 6, h, much nearer to Achemenides, which Dr Sacy 
expected to find here: I think it ought to be read thus, dgamndsih. The 
extreme confusion and inaccuracy of AnqueTiL’s alphabet has prevented 
Groterenp, who took it for an established foundation, from determining 
the true power and number of the letters. Thus, in the Zend cuneiform 
alphabet, exhibited by Betrino, there are only thirty letters (three of 
which are marked as doubtful) out of the forty-two really distinct characters 
mentioned above,} and among those thirty the related letters (for instance, 
u, u, ®, v, i, 4 y, &c.) are not accurately distinguished ; nay, in the 
inscription just quoted, one character is read both é and 4, although another 
character, occurring thrice in the same inscription, is also expressed by ¢, 
Surely before the discovery is completed, it must be laid down as a funda- 
mental supposition, ¢hat each character has only one determined sound, and 
that no two characters signify exactly the same. This last, it is true, is the 
case with y and w in the Zend written alphabet ; but this alphabet, according 
* Vide Transactions of the Literary Society of Bombay, vol. ii. p. 170. 
+ Sir Wo. Jones has already observed many more letters in these inscriptions. “ In five of 
them,” says he, in his Discourse on the Persians, “ the letters which are separated by points, 
may be reduced to forty; at least I can distinguish no more essentially different.” The remain- 
ing two letters did not occur, perhaps, in the five inscriptions he examined. 
