Page:Discovery and Decipherment of the Trilingual Cuneiform Inscriptions.djvu/245

the languages most nearly akin, and upon the acumen with which the interpreter could apply the resources at his disposal. In other words, the task would pass from the decipherer to the translator; and it is in this department that Burnouf has earned the greatest distinction. Although he could conmiand only a limited number of correct values, and consequently his transliteration was still extremely imperfect, yet his knowledge of Zend, which was greater than that of any other scholar then living, enabled him to make sense of many of these crude forms and for the first time to approach to a correct translation of the words that were not simply proper names. When he began his labours, there were apparently only two words, 'king' and 'son,' that were correctly read, in addition to a few proper names, such as Achaemenian, Hystaspes, Darius, Xerxes, Cyrus and Persia;^[1] but to these both Grotefend and St. Martin had accumulated a vast number of worthless and misleading meanings, from 'the constellation of Moro' down to 'Jamshid.' Burnouf added several correct words to the vocabulary, and he was always able to avoid falling into extravagant error. He showed, for example, that the word Grotefend had taken for the conjunction 'and' was in reality a form of the verb 'to give or create.'^[2] He overcame the chief difficulty in the word he read 'aqunuch' = 'generator,' really 'ak'unaush,' 'to make,' and read by Grotefend 'florentem.'^[3] The word Grotefend translated 'Dominus' he rendered 'this is,' and suggested the possibility of its being 'I am' which turned out to be its correct meaning. Besides these contributions, he recognised the demonstrative pronoun 'this' (αim for αvαm, 'ce'); and he added the words 'heaven,' 'man,' 'master,' 'province,'

1. Burnouf, Mémoire, p. 166.
2. Ib. p. 58.
3. Ib. p. 82. Cf. Spiegel, p. 47.