56 THE TRIBUTE ROLL OF MONTEZUMA. 



The line of research which I believe will give us the clue to a cori-ect interpreta- 

 tion of the phonetic elements in the Mexican codices I have set forth and exemplified 

 with a number of illustrations in some articles published several years ago and col- 

 lectively republished in my "Essays of an Americanist" (Philadelphia, 1890). A 

 brief statement of the method there advanced may appropriately be introduced here. 

 It is agreed among those who have most carefully studied the subject that there 

 is but one path by which the human mind could have originally proceeded from ideo- 

 graphic or thought writing to phonetic or sound writing. This was through the 

 existence of homophones and homoiophones, that is, of words with different meanings 

 but the same or nearly the same sound. The same sign would come to represent two 

 different ideas, not that it represented them both pictorially, but because both were 

 expressed in the language by the same sound. This is the secret of the first intro- 

 duction of the element of sound into writing. 



An illustration of this may be offered from the Egyptian writing in its early 

 Btagc. The word nefer meant a lute, and in the early texts when the writer wished 

 to convey the idea of a lute he simply drew the picture of one, and all understood it 

 and read it nefer. But this sound nefer had in Egyptian another meaning, which 

 was "door;" just as in English the sound lute has also the meaning booty or plunder 

 (loot). It was discovered therefore that by reference to sound the picture of a lute 

 could also stand for " door " and thus save the trouble of having a separate sign for 

 that concept. Proceeding on this line the same figure would come to be employed 

 for a number of ideas expressed in the spoken tongue by the same or closely similar 

 sounds ; as in fact the sign of the lute in Egypt came to signify not only a lute or a 

 door, but a soldier, a colt and the adjective " good." 



When the word thus represented was a monosyllable, the sign for its sound 

 would apply not only to it but also to all words in the language where this syllable 

 occurred ; and thus a syllabic alphabet began to be developed. Again, when this 

 monosyllable coincided with one of the phonetic radicals of the language, that is, 

 with one of the letters of its natural alphabet, we perceive the beginning of the true 

 alphabetic writing. A simple example of this would be in English the picture of a 

 bee, which in sound represents the second letter of the English alphabet. 



The discussion of these distinctions is not irrelevant to the present theme. On the 

 contrary, the student must have them constantly in mind, for as he investigates the 

 phonetic elements of the Mexican codices, he will find that sometimes they represent 

 the whole of a polysyllabic word, at other times a syllable only, and more rarely, that 

 a true phonetic radical had been evolved and was employed just as we employ a let- 

 ter of our alphabet in writing a word. I believe it may be averred with safety that 



