Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/642

Rh ALPHABET picturesque but unwieldy system. The impure syllabism marked out for them by the genius of their language has been their furthest development. It was reserved for the Japanese to borrow the Chinese characters, and, expelling all ideographic associations, to employ them simply as syllables, thus advancing to a pure syllabic writing. This borrowing and extension of a system by a foreign nation will be more fully dwelt upon hereafter. It should perhaps be added that the expression of many different senses by one symbol, which has so largely modified the Chinese writing, is not peculiar to monosyllabic language. It is found in all languages, though not to the same extent : roots of different sense have been worn down by phonetic decay till they reach the same form, and this cause may have operated to some extent in China, though it cannot have been very important. The cuneiform writing, so called from the wedge-like shape of the characters, T or V, which compose it, was employed by different nationalities. It was first deci phered by Grotefend on inscriptions of Persepolis, and was found to be the exponent of the Aryan spoken by the conquering Persians, which belonged, as is well known, to the Indo-European family of languages. But cuneiform inscriptions in three languages were found on a monument at Behistun: the first was the Persian, and much the simplest in form; the second and third were composed of elements of the same shape in much more unwieldy combinations. 1 It was obvious that the three inscriptions were identical in meaning, but in different languages; and principally by the help afforded by recur ring proper names, whose value could be compared with the known values in Persian, the characters of the last two inscriptions were deciphered, and found to belong, one to the language of the Assyrian and Babylonian subjects of Darius, the other to the old Scythian population of Media, who used a Turanian speech. Other languages, the old Armenian and that of Susa, were found afterwards to be represented by the same characters; and to these different systems the collective name Anarien (i.e. non-Aryan) has been given by French writers (Oppert, &c.), to distinguish them from the Aryan-Persian, which is a purely phonetic character. It seems clear that the origin of this system was Turanian, and that it was borrowed by the Semitic races who used it. It was originally hieroglyphic, though the stiff combinations of wedges give but little indication of euch an origin. But both in Assyrian and Babylonian there is an older character and a newer one, and the older forms can again be traced back to a still more archaic shape, which was unquestionably the original of both, and which is not cuneiform, but composed of straight lines only. 2 These show little of the brilliancy of invention of the Chinese; they seem to appeal to the reason rather than to the eye; they are obviously intended to recall the image of the object, but they must have been first explained in order to be intelligible at all, and then they might be remembered. For example, a house was denoted by 1/3 a town by gible as soon as seen by a person who has not been taught them. This is probably due to the fact that they were produced, not by the hair-pencil of the Chinese, but by the chisel; they were intended to be written on rock, and for this straight lines are more convenient; and the wedge shape which they assumed afterwards may be explained 1 A part of this trilingual inscription is printed in De Rosny s Ecriturcs Fir/uralives, p. 70. 8 For specimens, see Oppert, vol. ii., p. 63. by the ease with which it can be made by two strokes of the chisel perhaps no other figure so clear can be produced with such facility. This system seems to have reached syllabism before it was adopted by the Aramaic peoples. But the syllabism was still mixed up with ideography, just as we have seen was the case in China that is, the same symbol denoted ideographically the object, and phonetically the sound, of the name of the object; as though in English we should denote by the symbol B both the insect lee and the sound be. But there is a difference between this idiom and the Chinese; it was polysyllabic, whereas Chinese was syllabic. When, then, the name of the object contained more than one syllable, the first alone was taken to be denoted phoneti cally by the symbol. The evidence for this is small in quantity, owing to the scanty remains of the language of that Turanian element of the Chaldee nation from which the cuneiform writing was borrowed. To this language the name Accadian has been given by Dr Hincks, and this name seems to be now generally received. But the Medo-Scythic, mentioned above, which is a closely-con nected dialect, supplies us with forms sufficiently close to the old Scythian spoken originally by all the Turanian stock in that part of Asia. Thus one symbol in Assyrian denotes ideographically God and phonetically an; now the name for God in Medo-Scythic is Annap. Another denotes a city and but; batin is a city in Scythian. Another is a father and at; in Scythian a father is atta. (Oppert, ii. 79 ; Lenormant, i. 41.) This evidence will doubtless be strengthened with time, but even now it is conclusive; and the principle thus established, the arbitrary selection of the first part of a name to have a particular phonetic value, seems to be exactly the principle which we should a priori have expected to find if we had tried to conceive the possible ways in which ideography could pass into phonetism. The confusion which was occasioned by the imperfection of Assyrian writing was immensely increased by the fact of their characters being borrowed, not indigenous, as in China. There is first of all the obvious difficulty of adapting Turanian symbols to a Semitic language, in which the short vowels were not written, and the meaning of the radical group of consonants in any particular place had to be determined by the context. Instead of being able to retain the same symbol to express a root in its modified forms, e.g. in the conjugation of a verb, a new symbol would be necessary for each person-form, which could be expressed by mere vowel change in the root, and these sym bols might be totally unconnected, so that all sense of the connection of different parts of a verb would be lost. This is bad enough, but it is an evil inherent in the borrowing of such a system of writing to express a language whose genius was so essentially different. But there was another evil, much greater, which might have been avoided, and was not. This is polyphony the expression of many different sounds by the same symbol. When the Assyrians took an Accadian symbol, they should have taken only its phonetic value, or one of them, if it had more than one, and in this way they might have acquired a, purely syllabic character, as the people of Susa afterwards actually did. But, as was not unnatural at the time, they took it with all its values, ideographic and phonetic, and added more of their own. A striking example given by Oppert (ii. 85) will make this plain. In Accadian this symbol A was the ideogram for an open hand, doubtless originally in a more elaborate form. In the spoken language a hand was called kurpi, and therefore, by the principle mentioned above, this symbol had also the phonetic value kur. But by a metaphor the hand symbol had the further ideographic
 * & Neither of these are symbols which will be intelli