346 Proceedings of the Roi/al Irish Academy. 



the same uame, wliich often liappeiis ; probably iios. 1 and 8 also have the same 

 name, a character being omitted from the latter, by accident, or to save space- 

 Thirdly, two of the witnesses occupying adjacent positions on the list, 

 the tifth and sixth, are described as MsrjX^o- \)a^ M?kq_. Here we have a 

 name and title iiot preceded by ^. This would therefore be the name of some 

 person, not himself a witness, but holding a special relation to the two 

 witnesses in question — most likely their father. In this case the prefix s 

 might have a genitive sense. And further, this person is described as 

 pa M^kq- As one of his supposed sons is similarly described as 1^ M^kq, we 

 seem to be on the track of some hereditary designation, honorary or official. 

 The words pa, 12, might denote something like ' first ' and ' second ' 

 respectively ; the line M^sswufl \'Z iVI^kq MsijA^o- pa_MSkq would then mean 

 something like " In the presence of (sswufl) second (officer) before (kq) (i.e. 

 perhaps a king or a god) (son) of (jjXSo-) first (officer) before (kq)." Some 

 such formula seems not unlikely to occur in a list of this nature. 



Next, having got from these names the suggestion of a form of declension 

 by means of prefixes, let us see if further traces of it are to be found. We 

 have not to seek long, for fortunately there is one word of which there are 

 several forms. This is j3h, the last word ou Face I. We find 



s-/3h--w 

 h-/8h 



Compare also s-m^j) and n-m2^t/. There is also reason to regard x as a 

 declensional prefix : thus we have nvhf, x-nvhf. The two postfixes w and ? 

 reappear in kq-w, kq-5. 



Other words with similar formatives occur in the text, though as they 

 occur once only we have no full examples of their declension. Thus we have 

 X->iS, l6g-?, h-Sc-w, n-S8g-w, and one or two others as well. In some 

 cases, of course, these may be accidental, a syllable which is really radical, 

 belonging to the stem of the word, happening to have the same sound as one 

 of the prefixes or suffixes ; there is no possibility of discriminating these until 

 some chance in the future shall reveal to us the phonetic meaning of the 

 symbols. However, an unportant grammatical rule now emerges, which, I 

 venture to think, corroborates the conclusions to which we have come. Just 

 as m Latm, words like honus dominus, bono domino, etc., in apposition, 

 terminate with the same suffix, so in the language of the disc, words in 

 apposition begin vjiih the same prefix. 



