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XII.] been traced, though more doubtfully, to the same source; and India, especially, has been a home where it has developed into new and richer forms, and whence it has been extended over a vast region, in Asia and the islands lying southward from Asia—reaching at last, in its remote derivatives, conditions as unlike to the original and to one another as are the late dialects of a widely disseminated family of languages. In nearly all these countries, through all its various metamorphoses, it has held fast, in the main, to its primitive character of a consonantal alphabet, with omission, or with partial or subordinated designation, of the vowels. But in its progress in the other direction, toward Europe, it fell first into the hands of the Greeks; and from them it received its final perfection, by the provision of signs enabling it to represent the vowels not less distinctly than the consonants. In the Greek alphabet, for the first time in all our review of the history of written speech, we find realized what we cannot but regard as the true ideal of a mode of writing—namely, that it be simply a faithful representation of spoken speech, furnishing a visible sign for every audible sound that the voice utters, not attempting to distinguish any class of sounds as of more importance than another, nor to set itself up as an independent instrumentality for the conveyance of thought by overpassing the limits of utterance, and assuming to give more or other than the voice gives in speaking.

From the Greek alphabet have been derived, by modifications and adaptations of greater or less consequence, several others, used by peoples of each of the grand divisions of the eastern continent—as the Coptic of later Egypt, already referred to, and the Armenian; the runes of some of the Germanic tribes also, and the early Celtic modes of writing, trace their origin back to it, mainly through the Latin; as does the modern Russian, the most ungainly and unsymmetrical, perhaps, of all its descendants. But the Latin alphabet itself is beyond all comparison the most important of its derivative forms. The Greek colonies of southern Italy were the means of bringing Greek letters to the knowledge of the inhabitants of the peninsula, and several of the Italian nations—the Etruscans, Umbrians, and Oscans, as well as the