Morris.] [March 6, 



iles. What more natural than for those who had charge of these records to 

 endeavor to conceal their contents by such a veil as opportunity afforded, 

 viz., that the ancient phonetic value of the letters had been lost and the 

 meaning of the words so obscured that only those initiated by long study 

 of the Jewish sacred mysteries and traditions could read them? In this 

 way we have accounted for the rise of the school of the Talmudists, the 

 study of the Mishna and Gemara, and the origin of the Kabbala. No word 

 was to be pronounced as written ; it had an inscrutable meaning only to be 

 learned by the initiated and transmitted by the use of points added to the 

 letters. Add to this the inherent difficulty of representing the sounds of 

 any people in the vocabulary of another race ; as instances of this, take 

 the substitution of "1" for "r" by the Chinese in learning English, or 

 the difficulty a Frenchman or German has in acquiring our " th, " or the 

 Greek 6 ; or, as more to the point, the substitution by the uneducated 

 German Jew of "sh" for pure "s." There is something in the physical 

 structure of the vocal organs of each race which is reflected in the voca- 

 bles used by it. In the Hebrew race as met with to day this ringing 

 nasal character strikes us all forcibly. 



After these introductory thoughts, we are struck with the fact that one 

 of their Hebrew letters, the 7^, ngain, is so variously pronounced as to 

 make one seriously question its true phonetic value. Its place in the 

 order of the alphabet, as compared with the Phoenician and Greek, is that 

 of the Greek omicron ; its form in Phoenician and in the old Samaritan 

 is o. In many Hebrew dictionaries this value is given it. Take, again, 

 the *), vau, its place that of 'the Greek F, digamma, its phonetic value that 

 of the Latin v, or English ou. May not our double u, w, represent this, 

 as well as the German D, fow ? The sound of p, quof, is lost to Western 

 languages, except so far as represented by q, to which we add a w to make 

 it vocable to us. The letters p, samech, and JJJ, shin, are represented by the 

 Greek <r, sigma, and , xi, but are found in an inverted order in the alpha- 

 bet. [The confusion between these letters goes back to a far earlier 

 period when we find two of the Hebrew tribes disputing over Shibboleth 

 or Sibboleth.] 



But the very first letter is a vocable which in all other alphabets is con- 

 sidered a pure vowel sound, a ; the fifth, he, is another, e ; the sixth, chayt, 

 is e, or ch ; the tenth, yocl, is i, iota; and, as above, vau = ou, or u (or 

 sometimes for v), and ngain = o. We have thus all our usual vowel sounds 

 except y, which we know in French as ygrec, and substitute usually for 

 the Greek upsilon. In Hebrew we have two sibilants, zain and tsaddi, the 

 latter of which occupies the alphabetical position in Greek of upsilon. If 

 we now try to substitute in Hebrew, as ordinarily written, the above values 

 for the letters, we shall find we have a perfectly vocable language. The 

 names of men and places are given not very differently from our modern 

 pronunciation of them as elucidated by the pointed Hebrew, when allow- 

 ance is made for the difference due, as above stated, to racial intonation. 



