from the old
crude pictograph, and in some respects much more developed than the
complicated Egyptian method; yet, after all, a system that stopped short
of perfection by the wide gap that separates the syllabary from the true
alphabet.

A brief analysis of speech sounds will aid us in understanding the real
nature of the syllabary. Let us take for consideration the consonantal
sound represented by the letter b. A moment's consideration will make
it clear that this sound enters into a large number of syllables. There
are, for example, at least twenty vowel sounds in the English language,
not to speak of certain digraphs; that is to say, each of the important
vowels has from two to six sounds. Each of these vowel sounds may enter
into combination with the b sound alone to form three syllables; as
ba, ab, bal, be, eb, bel, etc. Thus there are at least sixty b-sound
syllables. But this is not the end, for other consonantal sounds may be
associated in the syllables in such combinations as bad, bed, bar, bark,
cab, etc. As each of the other twenty odd consonantal sounds may enter
into similar combinations, it is obvious that there are several hundreds
of fundamental syllables to be taken into account in any syllabic system
of writing. For each of these syllables a symbol must be set aside
and held in reserve as the representative of that particular sound. A
perfect syllabary, then, would require some hundred or more of symbols
to represent b sounds alone; and since the sounds for c, d, f, and the
rest are equally varied, the entire syllabary would run into thousands
of characters, almost rivalling in complexity the Chinese system. But
in practice the most perfect syllabary, Such as that of the Babylonians,
fell short of this degree of precision through ignoring the minor shades
of sound; just as our own alphabet is content to represent some thirty
vowel sounds by five letters, ignoring the fact that a, for example, has
really half a dozen distinct phonetic values. By such slurring of sounds
the syllabary is reduced far below its ideal limits; yet even so it
retains three or four hundred characters.

In point of fact, such a work as Professor Delitzsch's Assyrian
Grammar(6) presents signs for three hundred and thirty-four syllables,
together with sundry alternative signs and determinatives to tax the
memory of the would-be reader of Assyrian. Let us take for example a few
of the b sounds. It has been explained that the basis