Vol. I - The Coptic Orthodox Church

Champollion-
Figeac
accepts the
arrangement
of the
" Scala."
He rejects
the Chinese
arrangement
of characters.
He discusses
Birch's plan
and rejects it
XXX Introduction.
Such was the arrangement of words in the model which
Champollion-Figeac took as a guide for the arrangement
of words
in his brother's Egyptian Dictionary, and he asks the question
'
L'exp6rience ou le raisonnement indiquaient ils une autre
"
methode ? Experience, he says, suggests a single example only,
namely the Chinese, but having described at some length the
differences that exist between the Chinese and Egyptian languages,
he decides that even if analogies and a similitude between these
two languages did exist originally they do so no longer. The
Chinese Dictionary must not be employed as the model for a
Hieroglyphic Dictionary, only the Coptic Scala is any
use for this
purpose. Champollion-Figeac then goes on to mention that
another system has been proposed and even tried, namely that
advocated by Samuel Birch in his " Sketch of a Hieroglyphical
Dictionary." Having examined the Preface to this work he
"
says, Though the specimen, which I owe to the courtesy of Mr.
Birch, is brief, it seems to me to be sufficient to make clear the
defect in the general plan adopted by this scholar. The phonetic
characters are divided into vowel characters and consonantal
characters ;
the symbolic or ideographic characters are separated
and form a section by
the value of one of the eight hundred Egyptian
themselves. He who would search for
characters would
then be obliged to know first of all whether it is a symbolic or
phonetic character, and when the character forms one of this
second series, to know also whether its value is that of a vowel
or a consonant, that is to say, to know beforehand all that he
seeks to learn in the Dictionary. The general table proposed by
Mr. Birch will undeubtedly facilitate his searchings, but would it
not be more advantageous to spare students (i) the labour of
searching ; (2) the trouble of finding the human eye belonging to
the vowel I, the arms belonging to the vowel A, the leg belonging
to the consonant B, the two arms raised belonging to the con-
sonant K, the hand belonging to the consonant T, the mouth
belonging to the consonant R, the head full-faced belonging to the
aspirated consonant & ; and (3) the inextricable confusion of
forms and expressions that results from the mixing-up of the
members of the human body with quadrupeds, and fish and flowers ?
On the other hand, would not all the analogous characters which
the natural or rational system would write in the same series, or
the members of the human body, or animals, or vegetables, placed
together and each species grouped in a single chapter, characterise
more clearly a system which is truly natural and, in consequence,