Page:About Mexico - Past and Present.djvu/113



HE uncivilized man pictures the event he wishes to record. If he is describing a battle, he draws something which suggests war—his arrows, his tomahawk or the scalp of his foe. Water is often expressed by a waved line; a month, by the figure of the moon; a day, by that of the sun. In such rude pictures originated the old Hebrew alphabet in which Moses wrote, as is shown by the names of the letters. Thus, aleph means "an ox;" beth, "a house;" gimel, "a camel;" and daleth, "a door." Through ages of use the lines of these pictures were changed and simplified, until they became merely letters in which the original design could scarcely be traced.

An advance in civilization is shown by an effort to express abstract ideas by signs. Among the ancient Egyptians an ostrich-feather was chosen to represent the idea of truth. They went still farther, and used signs to represent sounds as our letters do. Thus the figure of a hawk meant the sound a, etc. In the next step in written language both pictures and symbols are dropped, and signs are used only to represent the sounds of spoken language—characters which can be combined to make syllables and words. This is phonetic writing. If a man can write one word in this way, he can go on and write a hundred words, or five hundred if he has learned to use