Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/372

 348 ALPENA ALPHABET crossed the Oxus with an immense army ; but he was stabbed to death by the governor of the first fortress he captured, whom he had or- dered to be executed in revenge for his obsti- nate defence. Alp Arslan's virtues as a ruler are no less extolled than his courage as a war- rior. ALPEXA, a county of E. N. E. Michigan, on Lake Huron and Thunder bay, drained by Thun- der Bay river; area, 700 sq. m. ; pop. in 1870, 2,756. In 1870 there were only 319 acres of improved land. Capital, Alpena. ALPES, Basses and Mantes. See BASSES- ALPES, and HAUTES- ALPES. ALPES-MARITIMES, a S. E. department of France, formed from the circle of Nice, ceded to France by Italy in 1860, and the arrondisse- ment of Grasse, taken from the department of Var; area 1,482 sq. m. ; pop. in 1872, 199,037. It lies between the Mediterranean and the mountains from which it takes its name, and is watered by the Var and several smaller streams. The surface is mountainous and crossed by nu- merous valleys. The climate is the finest in France. The country near the coast is well cultivated, and elsewhere there are valuable forests and various mineral productions. The department is divided into the arrondissements of Nice, Grasse, and Puget-Th6niers. The coast is dotted with places naturally or his- torically interesting, such as Nice, the capital, Cannes, Antibes, and Mentone. ALPHA AND OMEGA, the first and last letters of the Greek alphabet. The book of Revelation three times designates Jesus Christ by the title Alpha and Omega, perhaps in imitation of Isaiah (xliv. 6), who represents God as saying, " I am the first, and I am the last." ALPHABET (from the names of the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta, and therefore the equivalent of our A, B, C), the scheme of signs by which a language is written ; as also, less properly, the scheme of articulate sounds expressed by those signs, and constituting by their combinations the spoken language. It is in the former sense only that the word will be understood here ; the scheme of articulations the spoken alphabet, as it may be termed will be treated, in its character and relations, under the head of PHONETICS. All alphabets are not of the same kind. The intent of such a one as the Greek, the Latin, and our own, is to furnish a sign for every articulate sound of the spoken language, whether vowel or consonant; and its ideal is realized when there are practically just as many written characters as sounds, and each has its own unvarying value, so that the writ- ten language is an accurate and unambiguous reflection of the spoken. This state of things ts not wont to prevail continuously in any given language ; for, in the history of a literary language, the words change their mode of ut- terance, or their spoken form, while their mode of spelling, or their written form, remains un- altered, or is not correspondingly altered; so that the spelling comes to be " historical " in- stead of "phonetic," or to represent former instead of present pronunciation. Such is, to a certain extent, the character of our English spelling ; but very incompletely and irregularly, and with intermixture of arbitrarinesses, and even blunders, of every kind ; it is an evil that is tolerated, and by many even clung to and extolled, because it is familiar, and a reform would be attended with great difficulties, and productive for a time of yet greater inconve- nience. Some alphabets are syllabic ; that is to say, they have a sign for every syllable, com- posed of a vowel or diphthong and one or more consonants, that enters into the composition of the words of a language: examples are the Cherokee syllabary, invented by Sequoyah or George Guess, containing 85 signs; and the Japanese irofa, containing 47 signs. Others, again, are consonantal ; that is to say, the con- sonants are either written alone, the vowels being unexpressed, or only the consonant has a full sign, and the vowel is expressed by a mod- ification of it, or a subsidiary sign attached to it : examples are the Hebrew and Sanskrit al- phabets, each having a large number of kindred systems. Then there are modes of writing which are not entitled to be called alphabetic : as the Egyptian or hieroglyphic, in which simple phonetic or alphabetic signs are mingled with syllabic, ideographic, and pictorial ; or as the Chinese, in which there is an indivisible sign for each whole (monosyllabic) word, and even to a great extent for each different meaning of a word, so that the written signs are many times more numerous than the spoken words. The origin and historical and theoretic rela- tions of these different modes of representing to the eye the spoken word will be explained in the article WRITING. The English alphabet is derived from the Latin, the Latin from the Greek, and the Greek from the Phoenician. The origin of the Greek alphabet is reported by the Greeks themselves; and their report is confirmed both by the forms of their charac- ters, and by the names given them : alpha, be- ta, gamma, delta, &c., are the Hebrew aleph, beth, gimel, daleth, &c. appellations which have their correspondents also in the other Semitic alphabets, as the Syriac and Arabic. The Phoenician alphabet, in fact, is the old Se- mitic alphabet, used by many of the Semitic peoples; itself of unknown origin, it has become the mother of nearly all the prevailing modes of writing in the world. It was a consonantal scheme, composed of 22 signs (see the table on p. 351), representing the following sounds: ' (aleph), ft, g, d, h, w, s, 'h, t, y, k, I, m, n, 8, I (airi), p,, q, r, *A, t. Of these, aleph is rather a theoretical device, a figment to attach the utterance of any desired vowel to ; 'A is a stronger and deeper h ; and are different from our ordinary t and, as being s] token with greater effort, and with a peculiar articulation (the flat of the tongue, it is said, pressed against the roof of the mouth) ; ain is a very peculiar guttural utterance, wholly unlike anything in