Page:Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal Vol 7, Part 2.djvu/70

u ma !. This letter admits of no doubt whatever ; but in the Menander form, iij, I now recognise the inflection me, corresponding with the Greek name more closely.—Mi is written ‘t’ ; md, .“ or Y ; and ‘ may be mu. The second or what may be called the printed form of m has a considerable affinity in form with the old Sanskrit or , whence it may be almost as readily derived as the Burmese form of P1J, ç. A ye. This letter is unchanged: it invariably replaces z, and y, and sometimes j where the latter would be expressed by the Sanskrit or J,. It may perchance have been modified from the letter, for in some examples it is turned up on the sides thus, the inflected form A yi is of common occurrence: , yes, less common. ‘i, 5, ra. It is necessary to preserve these three representatives of r; I incline to think that the prolongation below may be the mdtra or the long d inflection, rd; for the first form is used in ETWUSiOU where there is no intervening vowel. It is only distinguishable from ci by the foot-mark of the latter, which seems to be often omitted notwithstanding: its inflections are ,, ‘i, , ri, re, res. ii, la. Further acquaintance has taught me that this is the only representative of A in Greek names: the instances wherein the 1 before appeared to be replaced by 1. have been disproved by duplicate coins. The inflected form 4, Ii, has numerous examples among our new acquisitions. 1 le, also occurs in inscriptions. ‘1 Va, and Ii vi, rest on strong but not undisputable authoiity, as will be seen below. , ., ha, has been removed from its former position as 1 on ample grounds; and the value now assigned has I think equally song support —though as far as Greek names are concerned it rests solely on the initial syllable of Ileliocle,, t, 1w. There is, again a similarity worthy of remark between (U inverted, and the old Sanskrit ha, (i-, . p, sa. To this letter I gave the sound of o on the former occasion, because I found it the general termination of nominatives masculine in Zend and Nfl—replacing the Sanskrit si.arga, au or as. Since then I have found the same letter (affected with the vowel i) in two Greek nanfes as the equivalent of n, ‘f, and I am too happy on other considerations to adopt this as its constant value; whether the dental, of the Sanskrit will best represent it remains tobeseen, but the nearest approximation in form occurs in the Hebrew o s: there are certainly two other characters, r, or ‘p, and Ti, having the force of. or eli. The former I should presume to be the Sanskrit sha w from its likeness to the old form m. The latter, Ti, may be a variation of A for which it is sometimes used, but rather by change of the Greek z to x, than as being the same letter, for elsewhere it takes the place of the Greek a