THE ALPHABET.*
CivinsmoN has bad its historians ; and the various movements of the human mind which collectively produce what we term civilisation—literature, the arts, philosophy, religion—have been • The Alphabet : an Account of the Origin and Development of Litton.. 1/3.Thaao
Taylor, ILL, LL.D. 2 vo's. London : Keg= Lm Paul, conch, and Co.
each severally still more frequently and efficiently reviewed his- torically. But the primary art of writing, without which no literature could exist, except the ballads which were retained in the marvellous memory of primitive peoples, like the Greeks of prehistoric times and the Servians even into this century, can scarcely be said to have found its historian till now. Astle's History of Writing may, indeed, be cited, and so may a little book called The Alphabet, by the late Professor T. Hewitt Bey, whibh latter Dr. Taylor seems not to know. But whatever the merits of these and other books in their own generation, the discoveries of new alphabets and new types of known scripts during the last half century have given an extension and a fullness to our knowledge, which render it possible now to find the parentage of almost all systems, and to produce a general history of writing, such as could scarcely be dreamt of before. It is true, the subject is one of which our knowledge is certain to advance; M. Terrien de la Couperie already shows us the probability that one of the apparently most ancient systems of writing, the Chinese, will he proved to be an eastern off-shoot of the Accadian Cuneiform ; and after the decypher- ment of the various cuneiform scripts, we need not despair of reading any written characters. But the advance already mule in recent times is such as to render a book like Dr. Isaac Taylor's eminently useful and well-timed, and likely long to hold its position as a depository of the data scattered through a library of books, journals, and periodicals most difficult to bring together, and, not least, of remarkably sober and careful judgments by the author on the various problems presented to- him.
Dr. Taylor, however, has not given us a general history of Writing. He has limited himself to the history of Alphabetical waiting. Yet if, as he shows, the alphabet is everywhere based on an older syllabic system, and that on an ideographic, the history of the alphabet cannot be written without the explana- tion of the principles of these more ancient modes of writing; we have, therefore, a whole first chapter of seventy pages de- scribing these, as far as they needed to be known on account of their connection with alphabetical writing. We cannot avoid the expression of a regret that Dr. Taylor did not extend this part of his WO3 k so far as to make it a general history of writing. Those pre-alphabetical systems which led the way to the alphabet, like the Egyptian and the Cuneiform, are described rather fully, whilst those to which no such honour was destined, like the Aztec and other American systems, are scarcely touched upon. The fuller insight which we might have thus gained into the nature of non-alphabetical writing would have added new strength to the truth, which Dr. Taylor enforces eloquently, of the wonderful advance made by the adoption of Alphabetism, and the curious chance that it was reached at all, not once only in history, but several times, whilst some equally civilised parts of the world never attained to it. We fancy the addition sug- gested would not necessarily add more than about a hundred pages to the size of the book, and they would contain some of the most curious and interesting matter in the whole.
The right tone is touched at the outset, in treating all intel- lectual advancement, all civilisation, as conditioned by writing, and further, we may almost say, by alphabetical writing. For, be the mental powers what they may, unless men had an absolutely infinite memory, knowledge painfully gained must soon be lost again, if not by tbe death of the first possessor, at least by the dimmer notions in which the next generation would receive it, and then the next. No permanency of the ideas which were to produce the sciences and the universal religions truths could be ensured till there was a medium for handing down the notions of one generation to the next, which thus had not to begin afresh, but started at an advanced point of the road towards culture. Thus only could religious ideas be ever matured ; previously, when each tribe and each generation began again from the same point, there was little likelihood that the early childish stage of wild local superstitions would ever be passed. Writing changed all this, and gave in its first beginnings the elements of history, then of law, human and divine, including liturgies, then of poetry and the arts. But then, writing cannot of necessity be widely spread and univer- sally influential. The picture-writing, which is apparently everywhere the commencement of the art, and the hieroglyphs, which are only the picture-writing farther developed, and every later phase of non-alphabetic writing, are so com- plicated and so difficult to practise, that they everywhere remained the property of a class of professional scribes, generally identical with the priests, who had the chief need of the art. It is only when writing became alpha- betical and phonetical that it became the property of all, and capable of carrying on the ideas of general humanity from one generation to another. From our nineteenth-century point of view, it may appear curious that some Cadmus in the infancy of humanity did not all at once invent an alphabet,—a distinct sign for each separate sound used in language, so that the advantages of alphabetical writing would accrue to mankind from the first. But this could not be, any more than a Lycurgus could impose on the earliest men perfect laws, or a prophet endow them with perfect religion which would require no develop- ment with time. An alphabet could not be invented off-hand, because to the mind of primitive man language presented itself wholly synthetically, even the words not being understood as separate entities, but only recognised in their context; and ages must have elapsed before each word could be looked at as a complex of many sounds, and analysed till the ultimate component sounds had been discovered. Long before the human mind was capable of this analysis, it had been fully alive to the usefulness of writing, and had invented picture-writing, which received many developments before any different systems were inaugurated. Why the primi- tive ideograms (pictures of things or thoughts) were afterwards turned into phonograms (signs to represent the sounds of the words), is one of the abstruse questions connected with early writing which cannot be settled a priori, and of historical evidence there is naturally not much. However, the fact that in the Egyptian hieroglyphs the names of kings are written by the ideographic signs used phonographically, and surrounded by a ring to give notice of this peculiar use of the signs, makes it very probable that a difficulty was experienced in expressing proper names, which led to the first attempt to write their sounds. This attempt having once been successfully made, naturally led to the syllabic and the alphabetic systems of writing in general.
The question about the origin of writing is somewhat like that of the origin of language. We may ultimately find, a posteriori, that all human language springs from one source. But science has not taught this yet, nor seems likely to do so. For writing, Dr. Taylor gives five independent sources,—the Egyptian, the Cuneiform, the Chinese, the Mexican, and the Hittite, besides "the independently-invented picture-writing of various semi-savage tribes, such as the North- American Indians, the Picts, the Laplanders, and the Eskimos." That no more than five independent origins are now postulated is a proof of the progress that has been made in recent times in palieography. Not long ago, the Phenician alphabet was treated as original, to say nothing of less widely-extended scripts, such as the Runic, the Glagolitic, the Armenian ; while the Ethiopic and Indian alphabets were not affiliated to any known system. The Aztec ideograms and the Maya alphabet of Yucatan, which are combined as "Mexican," were treated by so recent a writer as the author of the article "Alphabet" in the current (ninth) edition of the Encyclopa3dia Britan- nia& as independent systems. But Dr. Taylor has wisely refrained from the unsupported guesses which were the temptation and the fruitful source of error in the pre- scientific age, and has based his conclusions and his conjectural, wherever he has allowed himself to indulge in any, on the historical evidence of the earliest known records. His work will thus never be antiquated, though, if the study of antiquity continues fruitful, it is to be hoped, rather than feared, that it will be supplemented by future discoveries.
Commencing with the pictorial writing of savage tribes, Dr. Taylor has no difficulty in showing that the Chinese writing was at first obviously pictorial, though the later simplification of the signs rendered the likeness to the thing depicted extremely difficult to recognise. He then shows the Cuneiform writing to be based on the same principle, though the mode of stamping linear characters by a style upon soft clay greatly obscured the original likeness ; and he exhibits the mode in which this system of writing, invented by a Turanian people, the Accadians, was adapted by their conquerors, the Assyrians, to their own lan- guage, by a process which (while sometimes retaining the original signs for things, notwithstanding the name) produced a great syllabary, on the principle that the sign for the ear, which in Accadian was called pi, could be used phonographi- cally to denote the syllable pi. Thus a syllabary was gradually created, from which, by the dropping of the vowel and reten- ton of the consonant, the advance to the alphabetical system was easy. The earliest consonantal signs were what are tech- nically called acrological—e.g., pi is used for its initial p, Seth (Hebrew, erc.) for S. And here is a wise observation on these facts.
The chief lesson to be learned is the universal prevalence of the law of evolution. In dealing with the history of writing, we are met by the same phenomenon which is so conspicuous in the history of language, namely, the fact that there is no such thing as arbitrary invention. The written symbols of speech are subject to the laws of evolution as absolutely as plants or animals, or the spoken words of speech. Thus, the processes by which the Persian alphabetic signs were evolved from existing characters, themselves the descendants of primitive pictures, may help us to understand the no less wonderful series of evolutions by which the letters of our own alphabet have de- scended from the primitive hieroglyphic pictures of the Egyptian monuments.
Man, therefore, like God, is found to use the simplest existing agencies, and to invent new systems only when no old one can be utilised for new circumstances or purposes. For Dr. Taylor does not here deny the invention of new characters when no old ones would serve, of which his book gives numerous in- stances. We cannot, however, help expressing a slight dis- satisfaction with the author for speaking as he does here and elsewhere of "Our own alphabet," "the English alphabet." We have always been accustomed to hear a`nd balieve that the English have no alphabet, but use the Latin characters; and the fact that we in quite modern times differentiate the Latin i u into and j, u and v, respectively, to distinguish the vocal and consonantal uses (which the Latins had as much as onrselves), and have added the double u, gives us no title to flatter ourselves that we have" evolved" a new alphabet.
The origin of the well-known Phenician characters was un- known and unsuspected till M. E. de Rouge read a paper before -the AcadSmie des Inscriptions, in 1859, in which he first broached the theory, which was afterwards supported by further investi- gations, that the Phenician letters were derived from the oldest form of Egyptian hieratic (not hieroglyphic) writing, as practised in the time of the Hyksos and the Exodus. The time and place are exactly suited, and the parallel tables of Egyptian and Phenician characters must bring conviction. The Phenicians, as the most roving of the civilised nations of antiquity, naturally picked up the alphabet as they picked up the articles in which they traded, and both used it themselves and conveyed the know- ledge and use of it to the nations with which they came into contact. Thus the Phenician letters are identical on the one- side with the earliest Hebrew and Moabite, and on the other with the various Greek alphabets. The history of the spread of the art of writing in the Greek cities, which, fortu- nately for our present purpose, were politically independent of each other, and adopted alphabets with considerable peculiari- ties, can be traced in their different modes of writing. The first document which shows a very early stage of Greek writing, and has the inestimable advantage of an approximate date, is in Upper Egypt, where Rameses II. carved the precipice of rock into an enormous temple-cave, guarded at the entrance by four colossal sitting statues of the King. These statues are partly covered by inscriptions, of which one consists of four lines in Greek, and "records the visit of certain Greeks, who were in the service of Psammetichus, an Egyptian king belong- ing to the twenty-sixth dynasty; and it must, therefore, date from the seventh century B.C., or from the beginning of the sixth." They are written from left to right, and the letters *gator) have already the force of vowels, and three new letters unknown to the Phenicians, 4,, are used. "Thus widely had the Greek and Phenician alphabets diverged from each order since the Greeks had acquired. the art of writing." Dr. Taylor, considering "the extreme slowness of the processes of alpha- betic evolution," decides that the transformation of the Phenician into these letters must have required several centuries. Perhaps so; but we think that he unconsciously uses a mislead- ing test. In later ages, when writing is extensively practised, changes in its forms are excessively slow; but the first changes, especially those which are required in the adaptation of the alphabet of one language to the usage of another widely different one, are sure to be much more rapid.
Cadmus, according to Herodotus, first landed on the island of Thera, then sailed on to Thasos, and thence to Bceotia, where (as well as at Thera) he founded a colony at Thebes, and taught
the inhabitants the alphabet. The Phenicians established trading posts on most of the islands of the /Egean, and at Chalcis and Corinth. But it is acutely suggested that some of the Greeks may have obtained their letters not from Phenicians, but from Arameau (Syrian) merchants of the gulf of Antioch, who coasted along Asia Minor at an earlier date, and came into con- tact first with Semitic tribes in Cilicia and Lycia ; these would then convey their letters to the Ionians of Miletus and Hali- carnassus and the Dorians of Rhodes. The differences between the two then produced the differences between the Greekand the Latin letters. While the Latin and other Italic scripts were obtained from the Phenicians at Chalcis through the Chalcidian colonies of Crimea and Neapolis, the ordinary Greek letters wore derived from the Ionians, and ultimately from the Arameans. Several letters of the alphabet testify to this double origin, especially the Latin letters L C 5, differing from the Greek forms A r This divergence is of the utmost importance to subsequent history. The Latin letters became the alphabet of all Western Europe, whilst the Ionian are the parent of the Coptic, Slavonic, and other Eastern scripts. The whole history of the develop- ment of the Greek and Latin alphabets from the Semitic, in- cluding the history of each letter, is deeply interesting. The Semitic languages do not necessarily represent vowels in writing at all, since the sense of every root is expressed by its con- sonants, and vowels serve only to indicate the accidents of number, tense, Src. But in the Aryan languages, to which the alphabet was transferred, the vowels are an equally important component part of the root with the consonants (r1 moneo, maneo). The letters originally used to denote breathings, which the Aryan required much less, were taken into use as vowels, and thus the Greek A, E, H, and 0 are derived from aleph, he, cheth, and ayin ; while the Latin H retains its original force as a breathing. But we must close, without touching on many less generally known scripts, on which Dr. Taylor writes with equal learning. We will only mention his very ingenious and probably correct solution of the puzzle about the old Slavonic letters called Glagolitic, which he derives from the Greek minuscule char- acters. The work is full of admirable tables of curious letters, which reflect great credit on the printers, Messrs. Gilbert and Rivington.
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