N ^~▼" riic foui'tcentli letter and eleventh I cniisDiiant of the Konian aliihabet. I This cliaiactcr has varied very little ^1 in form and not at all in value ^ since the orijiin of the alphabet. The orifiinal letter was apparently called nun, which in IMuenieian and in tlie North Semitic languages signified 'fish.' Apparently the early pietographio character represented a fish. See Alphabet. Phonetic C'har.^cter. y stands for the dental or alveolar nasal sound which is the equivalent to d and (. The sound is produced by a check or mute contact and sonant vibration of the vocal cords as in d with the addition of the opening of the nasal passage made by lower- ing the soft palate. The size and sha]ie of the resonance-chamber make the ditlerence between n and the other nasal letters. Under certain con- ditions n may have a syllabic or vocalic value, as in rotten, forgotten. In scientific linguistics this value is represented by n. It is sometimes silent after m or I in the same syllable as in damn, hymn, (iiiltimn, kiln. Hefore r/. k, ch it receives a semi-guttural or palatal coloring to harmonize with the consonant it precedes, as in long, think, pinch. Source. In its historic development » repre- sents an original n which has been preserved with great constancy through the Indo-Germanie period to the present time. Tlnis night, Gothic nahts, Skt. nakti.lMt. nox : or again Idg. *ncros, 'new^,' Skt. navas, Gk. vc6f, Lat. noros. Goth. niujis, Ger. ncu, Eng. iiric. In Anglo-Saxon an original Germanic n disappears before s. f. and I'. As A SvMHOL. As a numeral X = HO and ^
00,000. In chemistry X = nitrogen; Xa
sodium (i.e. natrum). NABA, niilia. A seaport of Japan. See Xafa. NABAB, na'bAb'. Le (Fr.. the Xabob). A story by Alpbonse Daudet (1S77). based on the career of a contemporary adventurer. Its char- acters are in large part actual persons thinly disgni'ied. NABAT.ffi'ANS (Gk. Xa/Saroioi. yahataioi, Ar. .Vans (11. Cor. xi. 32). At the time of the Emperor Claudius. King Abias undertook an expedition against Adialiene, but he was beaten back. Damascus was lost to Xero in the reign of Malchus II. (48-71). The last King of the Xabata-ans was Rabel II. (71-100). In 106 Cornelius Palma. Governor of Syria, made the region from Petra in the South to Postra in the Xorth into a Roman province. In the fnirtli cen- tury two provinces were created: Arabia with Rostra as a centre, ami Paliestina Tertia with Petra as centre. The latest inscriptions in Xaba- tiean ehar.'ieters are those of .M-Xamarah (.328), Zebed (.t12). and Harran (.508): but the lan- guage is purely Arabic. Later Arabic writers use the word Xahata;an as the equivalent of Ara-
