Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/640

Rh G02 ALPHABET some abstract idea. These two methods were probably nearly contemporaneous in their origin, because the necessity of writing at all supposes a considerable advance in civilisation, and therefore a considerable development of ideas. To this system as a whole the convenient term ideography is now generally applied. From this men have passed to phonetic writing, first, apparently, in the form of sylldbism, in which each syllable of a word is regarded as an independent whole and represented by a single sign ; then from this to alphabelism, in which the syllable is no longer denoted by an indivisible symbol, but is resolved into vowel and consonant, each with its own accepted sign. It seems probable that all known alphabets (with one or two possible exceptions) may be traced back to four or five parents. These have differed much in fruitfulness, but all were originally hieroglyphic. These five systems of writing are the Egyptian, the cuneiform, the Chinese, the Mexican or Aztec, and the curiously cumbrous characters of Yucatan and central America : these last may be seen interspersed with figurative paintings in a facsimile given by M. de Rosny at p. 20 of his very useful little summary, Les Ecri- tures Figuratives desDijfercntsPeuples Andens et Modernes. Of these, the first three alone can be said to have had any great extension ; and the first, if the Phoenician, and by consequence the European alphabets, were derived from it, far exceeds in importance all the rest together. These systems were perfectly independent, and developed them selves, each in the same course, but in its own manner, and each in the main to a different degree. At certain points in their history all but one became crystallised, and remained to show us the steps by which the progress to phonetism can be made. We do not propose to describe here fully any of these systems of hieroglyphics. We are only concerned to point out their relative degrees of de velopment, their deficiencies, and the consequent motives which must have impelled men by degrees to the produc tion of a genuine alphabet. 1 There are obvious deficiencies even in the most highly developed hieroglyphics. In the first place, they must have been excessively burdensome to the memory. They speedily lost their original form, which was in most cases too cumbrous to be retained when writing became frequent; their pictorial value was therefore lost, and the new form could not generally have been intelligible to a learner, who was thus obliged to acquire by memory an enormous number of symbols, compared with which even the Sans krit alphabet may be regarded as easy. Secondly, it is impossible by hieroglyphics to express grammatical rela tions : the order, indeed, in which the symbols are placed may denote the distinction between subject and object ; plurality may be expressed by the repetition of a symbol ; some even of the relations in space, denoted in more advanced languages by cases, may be pictorially rendered ; but all these helps do not go far to remedy this obvious want. Experience, however, shows how much incon venience a nation will undergo rather than make any radical change in its phonetic system. We have only to look at our own alphabet, with its numerous and univer sally confessed deficiencies and redundancies, and then 1 The authorities referred to chiefly are Endlicher (Chinesische Grammatik), Oppert (Expedition Scientifiqv* en Mesopotamie, torn. 2), and Bunsen (Egypt s Place in History, vol. v.) Frequent use has been made of De Rosny a book mentioned above, and still more of the Essai sur la Propagation de I A Iphabet Ptienicien dans I A ncien Monde, .by M. Francois Lenormant, of which the first volume only has yet appeared. It contains an introduction to his special subject, in which the labours of Champollion, Young, Lepsius, Bunsen, De Rougd, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and of Grotefend, Rawlinson, Hincks, and Oppert, among the cuneiform characters, are ably summarised, and set forth with much clearness. remember the fruitless attempts which have been made to work a reform in it, to be convinced that no people will of its own accord strike out a thoroughly new system of writing. Such revolutions can only be produced by the meeting of two different civilisations, and the reception by the one of the arts and ideas of the other. But such a meeting may, and more commonly does, only stimulate the inferior race to some partial development. For the new ideas new names are required : these may be metaphori cally represented out of the old vocabulary, as when the Romans called the unknown elephant the Lucanian ox, and of course wrote it so. But suppose the inferior people to be one which has not yet advanced beyond hiero glyphic writing; their simplest and most obvious plan will be to take the .strange name, and express it by those symbols out of their old stock which denote the nearest sounds to that of the name required. Such symbols then cease to represent ideas only, as they used to do ; they are consciously employed to represent mere sounds, and thus arise the first beginnings of phonetism. A good example of this process may be found in the Aztec (Lenormant, i. 29 ; De Kosny, p. 19, who also gives others). When Christianity was introduced into Mexico, the Lord s Prayer was reduced to writing in the following manner : The Mexican symbols nearest to the two syllables of pater were a flag (sounded a&pawtl i), and a rock (tetl) -.pater was there fore represented pictorially by a flag and a rock ; we cannot tell whether it was sounded as pan-tetl, or only as pa-te the nearest possible equivalent in the Mexican language, which has no r. Similarly, noster was phonetically repre sented by noch-tetl, pictorially by the Indian fig (nocktli) and the rock as before. Here, then, we have the application of symbols to denote sound without regard to the original sense ; just as we might draw the figures of an eye, a saw, and a horse, and convey by them the idea, &quot; I saw a horse.&quot; The Aztec would not long have the ideas of a flag, a rock, and a fig presented to his mind when he read these symbols; and so the first conception of phonetism was gained, the first move from hieroglyphic to alphabetic writing. Yet he had not attained the first real step in the progress i.e., syllabic writing because if he had decomposed his new words, pan would not have represented to his mind merely so much sound a syllable by itself meaningless : it would have given him only the idea of a flag. And further than this the Aztec language did not pass : probably it only reached this stage incompletely with a small number of words. The great advance to syllabic writing is to be found elsewhere ; first in the Chinese, perhaps through the accident of the monosyllabic nature of the language ; but with a clearly-developed purpose in the Aramaic cuneiform inscriptions. In the Chinese written character we find a considerable number of symbols which were unquestionably at first pictorial. Though but very slight vestiges of their original meaning can now be seen in them, yet they can be traced back to older forms which are unmistakeable ; and their origin is further attested by the name &quot; images,&quot; which the Chinese give them, as distinguished from others which they call &quot;letters.&quot; These symbols were simple, and denoted very ingeniously natural objects the sun (by a circle with a dot inside), the moon (by a crescent with a line inside), a mountain (by three peaks side by side), rain (by drops under an overarching line), a child (thus fT )i a mother ( r?&quot; &amp;gt; a figure expressing the arms and bosom effectively enough), &c. These symbols could be combined : thus the symbols for water and eye combined denoted tears, an ear and a door expressed hearing and under-