IV
The Alphabetic Vowel and Consonantal Signs in Sumerian Writing
When the Sumerian vowel and syllabic pictograms or word-signs are arranged in alphabetic order according to their universally recognized phonetic values in "roman" letters, as in the "Sumerian Lexicon" of Prince, in the vocabularies of Langdon and Gadd and in my Sumer-Aryan Dictionary — the other Sumerian dictionaries and glossaries in "roman" transliteration being all arranged characteristically by their Assyriologist compilers in the order of the Hebrew alphabet, apparently on the antiquated notion that all languages were somehow derived from the Hebrew, that supposedly "primordial speech" of the Garden of Eden — it is seen that they all fall within our alphabetic system and form a complete alphabetic series from A to Z (see cols. in Plates I-II), with the exception of the four late and ambiguous letters in our alphabet and the aspirated S. These four late ambiguous letters are the redundant C, also absent in Phœnician and representing phonetically both K and S, although deriving its form from G; J with the sound of Gi or a soft G, a consonantal differentiation from I and sounded Y in Teutonic; V a late labial with the consonantal value of F and used in Latin script as the equivalent of U, of which it is regarded as a consonantal form; and Y supposed to be introduced by later Greeks as an equivalent for U, and therefore properly a vowel, and in English confused with I. The letters F and O we shall see by the new analysis appear to be represented in Sumerian, although not previously remarked.
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