Page:Language and the Study of Language.djvu/484

462 consonantal value: three, however—namely, the signs for the semi-vowels y and w, and for what we may call the "smooth breathing"—partaking somewhat of a vowel character, and being under certain circumstances convertible into representatives of the vowels, i, u, and a.

The Phenician alphabet was thus strictly and exclusively a phonetic system, though one of a peculiar and defective type. We cannot possibly regard it, therefore, as an immediate and original invention; it must have passed, in the hands either of the Semites themselves or of some other people, through the usual preliminary stages of a pictorial or hieroglyphic mode of writing. More probably, its elements were borrowed from one or another of the nations, of yet earlier civilization, by whom we know the Semitic races to have been surrounded, before they entered on their own historic career. The traditional names of its characters are the recognizable appellations of natural objects, and each name has for its initial letter that sound which is designated by the character: thus, the sign for b is called beth, 'house;' that for g, gimel, 'camel;' that for d, daleth, 'door;' in some cases, moreover, a degree of resemblance is traceable between the form of the letter and the figure of the object whose name it bears. This, so far as it goes, would evidently point toward that application of the hieroglyphic principle which, as we saw above (p. ), made the figures of the lion and eagle represent in Egyptian use the letters l and a. The subject of the ultimate history of the Phenician alphabet, however, is too obscure and too much controverted for us to enter here into its discussion; investigations of it have reached hitherto no satisfactory results.

The diffusion which this alphabet and its derivatives have attained is truly wonderful. From it come, directly or indirectly, the three principal Semitic alphabets, the Hebrew, the Syriac, and the Arabic, the last of which has gained currency over no inconsiderable part of the Old World, being employed by nations of diverse race, Indo-European (Persian, Afghan, and Hindustani), Scythian (Turkish), and Polynesian (Malay); while the Syriac has spread, through the Uigur Turkish, Mongol, and Manchu, to the farthest north-eastern Asia. The eastern Iranian and the Indian alphabets have