Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/639

Rh 601 ALPHABET BY an alphabet we mean a list of symbols which repre sent conventionally to the eye the sounds which are heard in the speech of a nation. An alphabet will therefore be perfect if the number of its symbols exactly corresponds to the number of simple sounds which are commonly distinguishable in the spoken language. But this perfection has probably never yet been reached : all known alphabets have failed, either by defect, i.e., from not representing all the simple sounds ; or by redundancy, in having more than one symbol for the same sound. They must also necessarily become imperfect by lapse of time. No nation keeps the sound of its language unaltered through many centuries : sounds change as well as grammatical forms, though they may endure longer, so that the symbols no longer retain their proper values; often, too, several different sounds come to be denoted by the same symbol ; and in strictness the alphabet should be changed to correspond to all these changes. But little inconvenience is practically caused by the tacit acceptance of the old symbol to express the new sound ; indeed the change in language is so gradual that the variation in the values of the symbols is imperceptible. It is only when we attempt to produce the exact sounds of the English language less than three centuries ago that we realise the fact that if Shakespeare could now stand on our stage he would seem to us to speak in an unknown tongue ; though one of his plays, when written, is as perfectly intelligible now as then. Such changes of sound are most developed in countries where many different dialects, through con quest, immigration, or otherwise, exist side by side : they are checked by the increase of education and by facility of locomotion both of which causes tend to assimilate all dialects to that one which by some lucky chance has become the literary speech of the nation. The term alphabet has come to us from the Latin alphabetum, which, however, occurs in no prose writer before Tertullian. It could not have been used, for metrical reasons, by Juvenal, when he wrote, &quot; Hoc discunt omnes ante alpha et beta puellae &quot; their ABC. But there is no reason why it should not have existed earlier : the word was borrowed from the Greek, as seems clear from the compound ava/V^a/fyros, which is as old as the comedian Philyllius (Meineke, Com. Frag. ii. 857), and he was alive in 392 B.C. It does not seem likely that this compound adjective would have been coined if the noun itself had not already existed in the same sense which it now bears. The symbols of our alphabet are nearly those of the Latin ; these in their turn were borrowed from a Greek alphabet; and there seems no reasonable ground for doubting the common tradition that the Greeks derived their characters from a Phoenician source. All these borrowings will be fully described hereafter. At this point absolute certainty ends. We cannot prove to de monstration the origin of our alphabet ; but positive facts and analogical arguments may be adduced which enable us to attain a very high degree of probability. It is now commonly believed that the characters were originally hieroglyphics, and in that ultimate form were devised in Egypt. There, for convenience of writing, they took a simpler form (called hieratic). In this shape they were borrowed by the Phoenicians ; and thus, in their long course down to us, they passed gradually from being the written expression of an idea into the written expression each of a single sound. It is true that the proof is not clear throughout : sometimes the links are feeble, and here we have to employ the analogy of other languages, in which the particular step which we want to prove has un doubtedly been made under similar circumstances. Still, it may with some truth be said that we can only prove the possibility of such a process, while any given alphabet may have had a perfectly independent origin ; the Phoenician alphabet may have been developed in Phoenicia itself, and never been hieroglyphic at all. But this is very difficult to conceive. The a priori argument for the derivation of phonetic from hieroglyphic characters is strong. Hiero glyphics have unquestionably been the first attempt of many nations in a rude state to record their thoughts in a permanent and universally intelligible form. It is also certain that these hieroglyphics have undergone progressive degradation of shape, so that their visible connection with the thing signified was often lost ; they became in many cases the expression of those combinations of sounds by which the things were denoted in the spoken language, though they still generally retained their original value as well. Here, at all events, a certain connection between hieroglyphics and sounds establishes itself ; and a priori it is more probable that all alphabets should have derived the single sounds of which they consist from hieroglyphics, through the medium of their derived phonetic values, than that any alphabet should have been produced independently of hieroglyphics (which are admitted to have existed), by some arbitrary process of formation for which absolutely no testimony can be adduced. As we have said above, such a process is not impossible, and may be true for any particular alphabet ; but the opposite theory has the most internal probability and all the evidence of which the case admits. Against this it seems insufficient to urge (as has been done) that there exist upon earth savages who have never developed any alphabetic writing out of their rude attempts a fact which may be readily granted ; or that civilised men often return to the simple methods employed by uncivilised nations, such as cutting notches on sticks or tying knots in strings such return being apparently adduced to prove that two totally different methods of expression can co-exist without there being any tendency to pass from one to the other ; nay, it is added that in Egypt the hieroglyphic and the common (or demotic) character did certainly exist side by side ; and if the latter were borrowed from the former, it would have superseded it, which it did not do. Now, in answer to this, reasons will appear shortly why the hieroglyphic characters lingered so persistently, even when the later phonetic character was- in common use nay, in the very same inscription or docu ment with the hieroglyphic. Still, the argument would&quot; have some weight if it were not grounded on the false assumption that the demotic alphabet was a purely phonetic one, totally unconnected with its more aged rival. But modern research has proved incontestably that the demotic- characters can be traced back to their original hieroglyphic- shape through the medium of the hieratic ; in fact, that the cumbrous hieroglyphics were successively put into more and more abbreviated shapes, for convenience of writing, as its use increased. Excluding, then, attempts of savages such as have been mentioned above, which were neither durable nor in telligible enough to make them of service, except for the- smallest number of men during the most limited time excluding these as not deserving the name, we derive all real writing from hieroglyphics, such hieroglyphics being either purely pictorial, the expression of visible objects in the external world ; or symbolic, when some external object is conventionally chosen to represent some action or I. - 76