Page:Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization.djvu/112

102 comparison, left for years unpublished, of the Egyptian hieratic characters with the old Phœnician letters, confirms Mr. Sharpe's view as to the letters Vav and Shin (f and sh), and on the whole, though identifying several characters on the strength of too slight a resemblance, it lays what seems a solid foundation for the opinion that the main history of alphabetic writing is open to us, from its beginning in the Egyptian pictures to the use of these pictures to express sounds, which led to the formation of the Egyptian mixed pictorial, syllabic, and alphabetic writing, from which was derived the pure alphabet known to us in its early Phœnician, Moabite, and Hebrew stages, hence the Greek, Latin, and numerous other derived forms come down to modern times.

It remains to point out the possibility of one people getting the art of writing from another, without taking the characters they used for particular letters. Two systems of letters, or rather of characters representing syllables, have been invented in modern times, by men who had got the idea of representing sound by written characters from seeing the books of civilized men, and applied it in their own way to their own languages. Some forty years ago a half breed Cherokee Indian, named Sequoyah (otherwise George Guess), invented an ingenious system of writing his language in syllabic signs, which were adopted by the missionaries, and came into common use. In the table given by Schoolcraft there are eighty-five such signs, in great part copied or modified from those Sequoyah had learnt from print; but the letter Ꭰ is to be read a; the letter Ꮇ, lu; the figure Ꮞ, se; and so on through Ꭱ, Ꭲ, Ꭵ, Ꭺ, and a number more. The syllabic system invented by a West African negro, Momoru Doalu Bukere, was found in use in the Vei country, about fifteen years since. When Europeans inquired