THE ETRUSCAN QUESTION. 93 



But this is an exceedingly cumbersome mode of expressing ideas. 

 An almost unlimited number of separate signs would be required. 

 This would be most burdensome to the memory, and be unable to 

 express grammatical relations. With the growth of ideas one sign 

 came to express several ideas by means of determinates, or small dis- 

 tingiiishing marks added to the sign itself somewhat similar to the 

 vowel signs in Hebrew ; but there was a tendency in these original 

 types of figurative writing to become conventional, as in the case of 

 Chinese and the language of the cuneiform inscriptions. Here the 

 signs do not at once suggest what they are intended to represent. 

 They have undoubtedly grown out of iconographic prototypes, but 

 they have lost their resemblance. They are called semeiographs, or 

 better ideograms. Now these ideograins mark a progress from purely, 

 figurative writing to phonetics. Thought and feeling naturally 

 express themselves in voice, and a phonetic value came to be attached 

 to the ideogram, and the sign suggested at once an object and a 

 phonetic value. But the representative value of these signs became 

 less and less prominent, and in time they were used only to express 

 a sound, or combinations of sounds. The name of the object repre- 

 sented a certain sound, at first no doubt the whole name, and then 

 only a part of the name. And in this way arose syllabic writing,^ 

 which was generally acrological, that is, the initial letter or letters 

 came to express the sound which was itself expi-essive of an idea. 

 In the case of the Chinese the ideogram has continued to express 

 only one sound, and not a combination of sounds, and so the language 

 has remained monosyllabic. The sacred books of the Chinese were 

 however accepted by the Japanese, who adopted the characters in 

 which the sacred books wei-e written, but they ascribed to these 

 characters a different phonetic value, while they combined them 

 according to the exigencies of their own national idiom, and to per- 

 mit of certain flexions. But this change, as exemplified in the 

 Japanese or similar instances, marks a change from the ideogram- 

 matic to the syllabic form. But the combination of signs permitted 

 by' the syllable allowed a great diminution in the number of the 

 signs. In place of the innumerable signs of the Chinese, the Japanese 

 expressed their vocalization by forty-seven characters wholly borrowed 

 from the Chinese, but having different determinate values. This 

 change of the value of the Chinese characters to the Japanese took 

 place ])robably in the third centxuy, but some five hundred years 



