Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/36

24 in the Indus Valley, partly to differences in the writing material by pen and ink, or brush, or wet clay or chiselled or cut on wood or stone, and partly to greater abbreviation by writing without lifting the pen, as for example, E becoming e and 𐤆 becoming &#X1D4A5;.

Let us now take up the alphabetic letters individually as regards their evolution: This vowel letter in its fully-fledged modern capital form is already found cut as an "owner's mark" repeatedly on Pre-dynastic and Early-Dynastic pottery in Egypt (see Plate I, col. 3), and its one-legged form (seen to be the source of our small or "minuscule" α) is also found there from the first Dynasty onwards.

This letter A is now disclosed to have its parent in the Sumerian Water-sign for A or Ā, picturing two wavelets. These were represented in the earlier Sumerian writing by two wavy lines or ripples [≈] (see Plate I, col. 1). Later, for more rapid and easy writing, these wavy lines were written by two parallel strokes sometimes with a short stroke on the middle of one of them or having the bottom one angular  to represent the curved line. When this angle in the consolidation of the sign pierces the top horizontal we get the  form or ᗅ. We find all stages in the evolution of this letter from this pair of strokes, straight and angular, in the "Semitic" Phœnician and Indian Asokan (see cols. 6, 11 of Plate I), in both of which the form of the sign is based on the later Sumerian style of turning the sign on its left side, which gives this "Semitic" Phœnician letter the form of

The one-legged ᗅ, as in Early Egypt as well as often in Greek and Latin is merely the result of more rapid writing of the letter without lifting the pen, and it