Note 373 — Chapter XIV · NINEVEH AND ITS WONDERS

Although it was supposed that this prize, awarded by so learned a body as the French Institute, would be tantamount to une sanction qui devrait dissiper toutes les susceptibilités, many remained as skeptical as ever and continued “to decry a language in which one can never know if a syllable is ideographic or phonetic, and, when phonetic, which of two or three different values it may have in that place.” Cf. A. J. Booth, op. cit., p. 416.