Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/648

Rh 610 ALPHABET sounds, followed in each case by a slight but distinctly audible breath; so that x might be represented in English characters by k h, though the following breath is not so distinct as an English h, if it were, we should have a compound, not a simple sound. Now two of these aspirates were actually written in the oldest alphabets KH and p H (pi having the right down-stroke much shorter than the left): for the dental the single symbol 6, borrowed from the Phoenician, sufficed. Afterwards the symbols &amp;lt;{&amp;gt; and x (variants (D and + ) were taken to supply the place of these compounds, from what source cannot be certainly known; but it is not impossible that they may have been characters of an older Greek alphabet which originally had the values p and Jc. This draws some proba bility from the history of ty. That letter was originally written p ; and, of which we have already spoken, written as K2 (or KM). But each of these also appears as &amp;lt;J&amp;gt;2 and X2$; so that here at least &amp;lt;/&amp;gt; and x appear as no more than p and Tc: the compound Q)Z remained perma nently in the Western alphabets. It is to Epicharmus that tradition (here with some probability) ascribes the -estab lishment of j/ in the alphabet. The history of, to is closely connected with that of 77. At an early period, certainly before the 40th Olympiad, in the eastern part of Hellas an attempt was made to distinguish the different kinds of e. The symbol e had hitherto denoted both c and the diphthong ti, where the t was probably not a much more important sound than the y e.g., in our day. The habit of writing the two symbols came in late in the Ionic alphabet, and so spread through Greece. But at the earlier time of which we speak the symbol H began to denote some e. It is commonly supposed that this was long e as distinguished from epsilon, which, by the way, does not mean short e, but &quot; e unaccompanied,&quot; perhaps by that after sound of i mentioned above, though a different reason is commonly given for the name. It seems very strange (hat the Greeks should have introduced symbols to express long e and o, and none to mark the length of the other vowels, which must have been just as urgently needed: surely this would have been done at Athens at the time of the formal introduction of the Ionian alphabet. Again, there are a great many recognisable varieties of sound which border closely on pure e and o (but none of imr portance near i and u), and such varieties are clearly marked in the south of Europe now. For these two separate reasons, it seems at least more probable that 77 was adopted to express a sound the same, or nearly the same, as the open e of the Italians. For the same reasons, it seems probable that &amp;lt;o was taken not to denote long o, but a more open sound ; perhaps something between open o and the English aii. The form O is of doubtful origin. It is found in an alphabet of Miletus of about Olympiad 60 ; not earlier. It looks like a conscious modification of O. Greek writing in the earliest times was from right to left, following the example of Phoenicia: several specimens of this still exist. The more convenient practice of writing from left to right soon became universal. It was preceded, however, by an intermediate method, in which the direction of the lines was alternately right to left and left to right, so that it was not necessary to carry the eye back, as with us, from the end of one line to the beginning of the next. This was called /Jovorpo^Sov, because the lines were made in the same way as the furrows by oxen in ploughing. Kirchhoff distinguishes two main divisions of Greek alphabets the East and the West; not that this geographi cal distribution is exact, but it is the most convenient. The eastern includes first the alphabets of the towns of Asia Minor Halicarnassus, Ephesus, Teos, Miletus, Colophc-n, and Rhodes, which, agreeing essentially, became that Ionic alphabet that was adopted at Athens 4G3 B.C., and is the Greek alphabet with which we are familiar ; secondly, those of the ^Egean islands Thera, Melos, Crete, Paros, Siphnos, Thasos, Naxos, in which 3 does not stand for Omega, but occasionally appears as well as o for Omicron, and there are other minute differences in the shape of the letters ; thirdly, some of the alphabets of the mainland of Greece, which have a closer affinity to the Ionic than to their neighbours, viz., the old one of Attica, down to 01. 94 Argos, Corinth and its colonies, Corcyra, and even Syracuse. The western division includes the remainder of the towns of Greece proper and their Sicilian and Italian colonies ; these are marked by peculiar variations of certain characters, especially g, e, h, th, I, r, and s, by the use of h as the aspirate only, by the absence of omega, and by the universal application of the symbol &amp;gt;V or ^ to denote, not ps, but ch, whilst X or +, the symbol of ch in the eastern alphabets, here denotes x. Compare with this last variation what we have said above of the use of X2 to express X : there can be little doubt that it was from the occurrence of X in this collocation, and no other, that this new value for it arose, and 2 was dropped. It is significant that in the old Latin alphabet XS appeal- instead of X. The difference in value of V in the eastern and western alphabets is perplexing : it seems that in one or the other the original value must have been consciously changed, but it is not easy to say in which. The most important alphabet of this group for our purpose is that of the Chalcidian colonies of Sicily and the west coast of Italy Cumse, Neapolis, &amp;lt;fcc. because from this was derived the Latin alphabet, the direct progenitor of our own. It is distinguished from others of the same class by the rounded form of the Gamma, by the peculiar form of the Lambda L , by the very old Mu (/w)&amp;gt; an d ID J a rounded Sigma *, &amp;gt; though it has also the two other ordinary forms ^ and 2, : in common with some other western alphabets, it has a double rho (P and R). (See p. 600.) From this Chalcidian alphabet it seems clear that all the Italian alphabets were derived. They fall into two families, which differ from each other considerably, but principally in the loss of old letters and the insertion of newdifferences which do not militate against their com mon origin, but show the cause of their separate develop ment. The first family contains the Etruscan, Umbrian, and Oscan alphabets ; the second the Latin and Faliscan. Into the peculiarities of the members of the first group we do not propose to enter at length : they agree in the total rejection of O and X, and the addition of a strange symbol ^ to denote the/ sound, van being retained with a slightly modified form for v: the Etruscan retains the symbols O and V which the other two dropped, and the Etruscan and Umbrian agree in rejecting the soft mutes. The Umbrian, however, has a new symbol for a modified d, peculiar to itself, and also for a modified k ; the Oscau has new symbols for a modified i and a, and in general shows a difference in the shape of its characters from all the other Italian dialects, which does not seem due to any other foreign influence so much as to its own individuality. These three languages are all written from right to left, in which the Faliscan agrees with them : the Latin alone, from the earliest time of which we have any records, was written from left to right ; but there can be little doubt that it did not originally differ from its fellows, but changed at a later time, just as the Greek alphabet itself