An Elementary Grammar and Reading - book of the Assyrian Language. By
the Rev. A. H. Sayce, M.A. (Samuel Bagster and Sons.)—In his pre- face, Mr. Sayce says that " Assyrian has become a popular subject, and the world of scholars 'Which once looked with distrust upon the labours of the decipherers has at last awakened to their interest and importance. Students are flocking in from all sides, and elementary grammars and progressive reading-books, like those which initiate tho pupil into Hebrew or Greek, are needed and called for. The present volume is intended to meet this demand ;" while the Assyrian grammar which Mr. Sayce published three years ago was meant for more advanced students either of the inscriptions or of Semitic philology. The purpose is most praiseworthy, and we hope that those who wish to learn Assyrian will find the help here offered them such as will enable them to make the desired beginning. But we confess that this grammar seems to us too short to be intelligible without the aid, either of a teacher, or else of more elaborate books, like those of Menant and Schrader. Surely an elementary grammar should have a chapter on the manner of expressing sounds in writing, of reading the signs so written, and of combining them into syllables and words ; and this all the more, when these things are done, in tho language in question, in ways wholly different from our own and other alphabetical languages. The Assyrian characters are not what we call "letters of the alphabet," but each re- presents a syllable, " open " or " closed," or else a half-syllable requiring a second character to complete or " close " it ; or it may be an " ideo- graph," and represent a complete word. And a simple explanation of these things, and of such parts of the grammatical apparatus as " syllabary," "polyphone," "phonetic complement," is needed by any beginner in the language. All these difficulties have been so long since left behind by an Assyriologist like Mr. Sayco that he is probably unconscious how real and how great they must be to him who knows nothing of the subject beforehand, but now first comes here to learn. But real and great they are ; and we fear that the absence of a clear preliminary chapter on these points, such as, niutatis Gesenius, for instance, begins with, in his elementary gram- mar, will be found a serious want to the mere beginner in Assyrian. And wo regret this deficiency—as, with all deference to Mr. Sayce's undoubtedly far better right than ours to judge of such a matter, we think it to be—the more because such a grammar as his title-page had led us to expect would be most useful and pleasant reading, not only to him who intends to make the original inscriptions his study, and to read them all for himself, but also for him who would be content with that amount of knowledge which would enable him to appreciate an argu- ment or an hypothesis of comparative philology in which the Assyrian language was concerned.
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