From the letters to Bunsen we learn that Lepsius at first was absorbed in Coptic, and, as might have been expected, as a comparative philologist. At the beginning he was discouraged by the entire linguistic isolation in which this interesting idiom stood, but he soon thought to detect a certain fundamental relationship between it and the Indo-Germanic and Semitic families of languages. On the twentieth of January, 1835, he already invited Bunsen to consider with him, in a quite superficial and cursory manner, the affixes of the _pronomen personale_, in Coptic and Hebrew, and the relationship of the two formations.[19] He next exerted himself to place before the public a specimen of Coptic grammar. He wished to begin by publishing a comparative division, which should be chiefly based upon the pronominal stems, and should establish the basis upon which the Coptic language had developed. It was further intended to show what position this should hold among the better known tongues. He had taken the bull by the horns, and was soon to find that little could be accomplished by giving prominence to such similarity in the terminal suffixes as struck the eye, or by the comparison of Indo-Germanic and Semitic numeral words with the Egyptian, between which also many conformities existed. As the first results of these new studies there appeared two papers on the alphabet and numerical words, which were submitted to the Berlin Academy in 1835, and were printed at the press of that learned institution. The apothegm, that even the loftiest speculation only teaches us to comprehend what is already in existence, occurs in the first of these papers.[20] By means of this treatise the knowledge of the true principles of the most ancient alphabetical order was advanced by a long step, and what was new therein was combined with the most thorough regard for all that had been previously attained. In the second treatise[21] he considerably extended previous investigations, and at the same time imposed upon himself voluntary restrictions which offer the most favorable testimony to his early acquired method and critical rigor. He would have been able to arrive at still more important results with the present knowledge of ancient Egyptian numerical words, and the numerical signs in hieratic and demotic.