analyzed the speech-sounds that he felt entire confidence in
them, and having selected a sufficient number of conventional
characters--each made up of wedge-shaped lines--to represent all
the phonetic sounds of his language, spelled the words out in
syllables and to some extent dispensed with the determinative
signs which, as we have seen, played so prominent a part in the
Egyptian writing. His cousins the Assyrians used habitually a
system of writing the foundation of which was an elaborate
phonetic syllabary; a system, therefore, far removed 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