Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/647

Rh to our h. Cheth was a strongly-marked ch, a continuous guttural sound produced at the back of the palate. Ayin represents a faucal sound peculiar to the Semitic race, varying between an evanescent breathing and a g rolled in .the throat. The Phcenicians employed hardly any vowel signs : in Hebrew the three principal sounds a, i, u (see article A) were sometimes expressed in writing, and long i and u were denoted, not by special signs, but by consonants akin to them, yodh and vav: a was regularly omitted except at the end of a word, where it was denoted by He and sometimes by Aleph. In fact, in all Semitic languages the practice was to ignore vowels in writing, leaving it to the reader to fill in, according to the context, the unvarying frame work of consonantal sounds : the Hebrew vowel-points were a later invention, rendered necessary when the lan guage had ceased to be spoken. When the Greeks received the Phoenician alphabet it is obvious that they must have made considerable changes in the values of the symbols. Several of them would be unnecessary, for they had no sounds in their language to correspond to them : while for other most important sounds, e.g., the vowels, no symbol was provided. It is clear how imperfect any previous alphabet of the Greeks must have been when they adopted in its stead another so foreign to the genius of their language, which developed the vowels and marked strongly the momentary consonants and nasals, but rejected as far as possible the continuous consonants, both palatal and labial, and even under many circumstances the dental s, the one sibilant they employed. But they ingeniously adopted the strange signs to new ends. Aleph, He, and Ayin were turned without difficulty into a, e, and o : Yodh became i, as it seems that the semi- vowel y had totally disappeared from Greece even at that early period: on the same principle Vav might have served to express v, although apparently the w-sound was still sufficiently common to require the retention of Vav with its con sonantal value. But from what source they took their upsilon cannot be known with certainty. Professor Key thinks that it is the Hebrew form of Ayin, which differs much in shape from the nearly perfect circle of the old Phoenician. This is possible enough, for the sound of Ayin was not more like o than u; and if the Greeks knew the two forms, it is not likely that they may have taken both. On the other hand, it is equally possible that v may be a remnant of an earlier native alphabet. Among the consonants (3, y, 8, K, X, fi, v, TT, p, r were borrowed with little change of form, and probably of value. And these letters (with a- and the vowels already mentioned) are stated by tradition to have been the only ones brought to Greece from Phoenicia by Cadmus, others having been added by Palamedes, Simouides, or Epicharmus; but which were the letters added by each of these is a question on which the different authorities do not agree ; and the incor rectness of most of them is proved by the letters being found in Greek inscriptions before the time of their supposed inventor. In fact, all tradition on this point is worthless, unless it is borne out by inscriptions. It is at least probable that the whole alphabet was borrowed at one time, for all, or nearly all, the characters occur on the oldest inscriptions we possess. Thus on inscriptions of Thera dating from Olympiad 40 (see Franz, Epigraphice Grceca, pp. 51-59; Kirchhoff, Studien zur Geschichte des Griechischen Alphabets, p. 41), we find Cheth in the form Q } denoting mainly the rough breathing h, but also applied to denote e, as it afterwards did regularly by the name Eta: Teth occurs as, nearly the later Theta ; and Koph as O , Koppa, a eymbol which was once current throughout Greece, and 009 remained universally as the numeral 90, though as a letter it was retained only by the Dorians, and passed with the Doric alphabet into Italy as Q. It may be observed that in this alphabet, and in some later ones of Crete, Corinth, and Corcyra, Iota appears not as a straight line, but in many curved shapes, approximating much nearer to the old Phoenician; and the same is true of Pi, which has the top rounded like a crook. We have then left only the four sibilants, Zayin, Samekh, Tsadhe, and Shin. These are believed to have had the values dz, s, ts, sh respectively. We have already said that the Greeks had no great affec tion for sibilants ; witness the manner in which cr was constantly dropped, e.g., in yeVeos for yevecr-os. It was therefore not to be expected that they could employ all the wealth of the Phoenicians; and one symbol (Tsadhe) appears in no Greek alphabet. The name, however, recalls the name Zeta; but the shape of Zeta (always HP ) is unquestionably that of Zayin; and its place in the alphabet agrees to this. It seems, therefore, most probable that the Greeks confounded together the two compound sounds dz and ts, and kept but one symbol, perhaps with the name of the other (Tsadhe), because it was most like that of the neighbouring letters Eta and Theta. This con fusion of the two sounds seems the more probable when we remember that no symbol was required for the com pound ts at the time when a special symbol for ps was added, and that for ks (another analogous compound) perhaps revived. There is also much uncertainty with regard to the relations of Sarnekh and Shin in their Greek dress. Xi ( = ks) occupies the place of Samekh, sigma of Shin. One form of Samekh seems unquestionably to have furnished that of the Greek 2, (see the forms, p. 600); another Hh is exactly the Greek of all the inscriptions. Sigma had the sound (s) of Samekh, and cannot be shown ever to have had the sound (sh) of Shin. Two names were preserved among the Greeks, sigma and san. Herodotus (i. 139) speaks of the &quot;same letter which the Dorians call frdv, the louians o-ty^ua;&quot; and though san was no letter of the Ionic alphabet, the compound sampi ( = o-av + 7rt) denoted 900. The name san is obviously the Semitic shin or sin: it is just possible that ory/m may be an attempt to turn samelch into a form which should explain its meaning to Greek ears. The oldest Greek alphabets known to us those of Thera, Melos, Crete, and the earlier forms of those of Argos, Corinth, and Corcyra have the form M to denote 5, that is, the equivalent of Shin. It seems fair to infer that this was originally the case in the other alphabets also. Then this symbol was dropped by degrees to avoid confusion with m, while one form of samekh, with the name sigma, was introduced into its place : another form was kept in its old place to denote the compound ks (xi). We now come to the apparently non-Phoenician letters of the Greek alphabet, &amp;lt;, x&amp;gt; jf, w. Of v we have already spoken : we may add that its sound was not a pure u, but modified, perhaps as is the German u. This appears from the fact that, when the Romans borrowed Greek words in the later times of the republic (when Roman taste had grown more scrupulous), they did not use their own symbol u to denote the Greek upsilon (as their forefathers had done), but together with the sound borrowed the symbol also: which clearly shows that the sound of upsilon was different from the ordinary u. We now take the aspirates &amp;lt;/&amp;gt; and ^. It is most probable that the sounds of the Greek aspirates x, 0, &amp;lt;, were not those of the German ch, and the English th and /: that is, they were probably not continuous consonants, but momentary I. - 77