In June 1849 Hincks read a paper on the Khorsabad inscriptions which shows a great advance upon any contribution yet made to the decipherment of the language. There is evidence in his essay on the Van inscriptions that so early as December 1847 he had practically given up the attempt he made in the previous January to assimilate the Assyrian writing as far as possible to the Hebrew—at least as regards the vowel system.[806] He is now satisfied that the Assyrian maintains a clear distinction between the vowels, and also between the surd and sonant consonants at the beginning of a word, though at the end the two sounds were confounded. He points out that no distinction is made between the sounds of _w_ and _m_, and, he adds, between _l_ and _r_; but he afterwards correctly admits the independent existence of these sounds in his Syllabarium.[807] He has also definitely arrived at the conviction that the Assyrian characters are wholly syllabic or ideographic—in a large number of cases they are both. He will not now admit that any of them represents a simple consonant. He has still no doubt that there are many homophones. Many characters appear to have precisely the same values, ‘though much fewer than might be inferred from a mechanical comparison of inscriptions and observance of interchanges.’ He recognises the existence of polyphones, already described by Löwenstern in 1847 as ‘homotypes.’ ‘Many characters,’ he says, ‘admit of two or more kindred values, the distinction between which would appear not to have been considered so great as to require different modes of representing them.’ This discovery was so perplexing that he doubted how best to present it to the reader: ‘Whether it is more desirable to give different values to the same character, or to give it one value only, with a warning to the reader that he may, under certain restrictions, substitute another for it at his pleasure.’