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THE MYSTERY LANGUAGE
My attention was first directed to the fact that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet were originally intended to bear more than the mere alphabetic value habitually attributed to them-through the consideration of the derivatives of the defective roots. I found that while the radical structure of the language was triliteral in character, as is the case with all the members of the Semitic family of speech, there was this difference between the roots-itself, of course, a matter of common observation-that whereas of some the whole of the three constituent letters were present in their derivatives, of others only two, and of yet others but one of the original radical letters was persistent in this way.
Then on further examination I realized that the derivatives of the defective roots could be referred to, and so held to have been derived from, more than one of the thus associated roots; and that the roots so associated through their derivatives were permeated and, so to say, bound together by a simple leading idea-or by two such ideas variously combined and interblended-which formed the basis of the derived meanings. Reflecting on these circumstances, it appeared to me that, what became later the letters of the Hebrew alphabet represented in the first instance each a simple root idea-that they were in fact symbols of ideas, and had been devised to that intent. Under this view, I ventured to call this method of writing ideographic; and the letters I designated ideograms.
These ideograms had distinctive characteristics and capabilities amongst themselves, whether taken
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