PHONETIC WRITING.
[Sidenote: Transition to phonetic writing.]
The step from picturing or picture-drawing to writing by pictures is, as
we have said, an immense one. But now we have to record one more step,
almost as great, which is the transition from the picturing of single
things--or, if you wish, single _ideas_--to the picturing, not of ideas
at all, but of sounds merely. This is the step we have now to follow
out, to trace the process through which picture-writing passed into
sound-writing, and to find out how signs (for we shall see they are the
same signs) which were originally meant to recall objects to the eye,
have ended in being used to suggest, or, shall we say, _picture_, sounds
to the ear. This is what we mean by _phonetic_ writing. A written word,
let us remember, is the picture of a sound, and it is our business to
hunt the letters of which it is formed through the changes they must
have undergone while they were taking upon themselves the new office of
suggesting sound. We said, too, that we must not expect to find any
written account of this change, and that it is only by examining the
_forms_ of the records of other events that this greatest event of
literature can be made out. What we want is to see the pictorial signs,
while busy in telling us other history, beginning to perform their new
duties side by side with the old, so that we may be sure of their
identity; and this opportunity is afforded us by the hieroglyphic
writing of the ancient Egyptians, who, being people disposed to cling to
everything that had once been done, never altogether left off employing
their first methods, even after they had taken another and yet another
step towards a more perfect system of writing; but carried on the old
ways and the new improvements side by side. The nature of their
language, which was in part radical and in part inflexional, was one
cause of this intermixture of methods in their writing; it had partly
but not entirely outgrown the stage in which picture-signs are most
useful. Ideograph is the proper name for a picture-sign, which, as soon
as picture-writing supersedes picturing, becomes the sign for a thought
quite as often as it is the sign for an object. Very ancient as are the
earliest Egyptian records, we have none which belong to the time when
the invention of writing was in the stage of picturing; we only
conjecture that it passed through this earliest stage by finding
examples of picturing mixed with their other kinds of writing. Each
chapter of the _Ritual_, the oldest of Egyptian books, has one or more
designs at its head, in which the contents of the chapter are very
carefully and ingeniously pictured; and the records of royal triumphs
and progresses which are cut out on temple and palace walls in
ideographic and phonetic signs, are always prefaced by a large picture
which tells the same story in the primitive method of picturing without
words.
[Sidenote: Egyptian writing.]
The next stage of the invention, ideographic writing, the ancient
Egyptians carried to great perfection, and reduced to a careful system.
The signs for ideas became fixed, and were not chosen according to each
writer’s fancy. Every picture had its settled value, and was always
used in the same way. A sort of alphabet of ideographs was thus formed.
A heart drawn in a certain way always meant ‘love,’ an eye with a tear
on the lash meant ‘grief,’ two hands holding a shield and spear meant
the verb ‘to fight,’ a tongue meant ‘to speak,’ a footprint ‘to travel,’
a man kneeling on the ground signified ‘a conquered enemy,’ etc.
Conjunctions and prepositions had their fixed pictures, as well as verbs
and nouns; ‘also’ was pictured by a coil of rope with a _second_ band
across it, ‘and’ by a coil of rope with an arm across it, ‘over’ by a
circle surmounting a square, ‘at’ by the picture of a hart reposing near
the sign for water--a significant picture for such a little word, which
recalls to our minds the Psalm, ‘As the hart panteth after the
water-brooks,’ and leads us to wonder whether the writer were familiar
with the Egyptian hieroglyph.
So much was done in this way, that we almost wonder how the need for
another method came to be felt; perhaps a peculiarity of the Egyptian
language helped the splendid thought of picturing _sound_ to flash one
happy day into the mind of some priest, when he was laboriously cutting
his sacred sentence into a temple wall. The language of ancient Egypt,
like that of China, had a great many words alike in sound but different
in meaning, and it could not fail to happen that some of these words
with two meanings would indicate a thing easy to draw, and a thought
difficult to symbolize; for example, the ancient Egyptian word _neb_
means a basket and a ruler; and _nefer_ means a lute and goodness. There
would come a day when a clever priest, cutting a record on a wall, would
bethink him of putting a lute instead of the more elaborate symbol that
had hitherto been used for goodness. It was a simple change, and might
not have struck any one at the time as involving more than the saving
of a little trouble to hieroglyphists, but it was the germ out of which
our system of writing sprang. The priest who did _that_ had taken the
first step towards picturing sound, and cut a true phonetic sign--the
true if remote parent, in fact, of one of the twenty-four letters of our
own alphabet.
Let us consider how the thought would probably grow. The writers once
started on the road of making signs stand for sounds would observe how
much fewer sounds there are than objects and ideas, and that words even
when unlike are composed of the same sounds pronounced in different
succession. If we were employed in painting up a notice on a wall, and
intended to use ideographs instead of letters, and moreover if the words
manage, mansion, manly, mantles, came into our sentence, should we not
begin each of these words by a figure of a man? and again, if we had to
write treacle, treason, treaty, we should begin each with a picture of a
tree; we should find it easier to use the same sign often for part of a
word, than to invent a fresh symbol for each entire word as we wrote it.
For the remaining syllables of the words we had so successfully begun we
should have to invent other signs, and we should perhaps soon discover
that in each syllable there were in fact several sounds, or movements of
lips or tongue, and that the same sounds differently combined came over
and over again in all our words. Then we might go on to discover exactly
how many movements of the speaking organs occurred in ordinary speech,
and the thought of choosing a particular picture to represent each
movement might occur; we should then have invented an alphabet in its
earliest form. That was the road along which the ancient Egyptians
travelled, but they progressed very slowly, and never quite reached its
end. They began by having syllabic signs for proper names. Osiri was a
name that occurred frequently in their sacred writings, and they
happened to have two words in their language which made up its
sound--_Os_ a throne, _iri_ an eye. Hence a small picture of a throne
came to be the syllabic sign for the sound _os_, the oval of an eye for
the sound _iri_; in like manner Totro, the name of an early king, was
written by a hand _Tot_ and a circle _ro_, and thus a system of spelling
by syllables was established. Later they began to divide syllables into
movements of the speaking organs, and to represent these movements by
drawing objects whose name began with the movement intended. For
example, a picture of a lion (_labo_) was drawn, not for the whole sound
(_labo_), but for the liquid _l_; an owl (_mulag_) stood for the labial
_m_; a water-jug (_nem_) for _n_. They had now, in fact, invented
letters; but though they had made the great discovery they did not use
it in the best way. They could not make up their minds to keep to
phonetic writing, and throw away their pictures and ideographs. They
continued to mix all these methods together, so that when they painted a
lion--it might be a picture and mean _lion_, it might be a symbolic sign
and mean _pre-eminence_, or it might be a true letter and stand for the
liquid _l_. The Egyptians were obliged to invent a whole army of
determinative signs, like those now employed by the Chinese, which they
placed before their pictures to show when a group was to be read
according to its sound, when it was used symbolically, and when it was a
simple representation of the object intended.
We have already pointed out how among the Egyptian monuments, the
sculptures on the tombs and temples, and in many of the more important
_papyri_--as, for example, their Book of the Dead itself--we have
specimens of all the three methods by which ideas may be conveyed to
the _eye_. We have first the picture of some event--the king, say,
offering sacrifice to a god,--then we have each separate word of the
sentence first recorded by ideographs, then spelled by ordinary letters.
Another source of difficulty in deciphering the writing of the ancient
Egyptians, is that they were not content with a single sign for a single
sound; they had a great many different pictures for each letter, and
used them in fanciful ways. For example, if _l_ occurred in the name of
a king or god, they would use the lion-picture to express it, thinking
it appropriate; but if the same sound occurred in the name of a queen,
they would use a lotus-lily as more feminine and elegant. They had as
many as twenty different pictures which could be used for the first
letter of our alphabet _a_, and thirty for the letter _h_, one of which
closely resembles our capital H in form, being two upright palm-branches
held by two arms which make the cross of the H. No letter had fewer than
five pictures to express its sound, from which the writer might choose
according to his fancy; or perhaps, sometimes, according to the space he
had to fill up on the wall, or obelisk, where he was writing, and the
effect in form and colour he wished his sentence to produce. Then again,
all their letters were not quite true letters (single breathings). The
Egyptians never got quite clear about vowels and consonants, and
generally spelt words (unless they _began_ with a vowel sound) by
consonants only, the consonants carrying a vowel breathing as well as
their own sound, and thus being syllabic signs instead of true letters.
Since much of the writing of the ancient Egyptians was used ornamentally
as decoration for the walls of their houses and temples, and took with
them the place of the tapestry of later times, the space required to
carry out their complex system of writing was no objection to it in
their eyes; neither did they care much about the difficulty of learning
so elaborate an array of signs, as for many centuries the art of reading
and writing was almost entirely confined to an order of priests whose
occupation and glory it was. When writing became more common, and was
used for ordinary as well as sacred purposes, the pictorial element
disappeared from some of their styles of writing, and quick ways of
making the pictures were invented, which reduced them to as completely
arbitrary signs, with no resemblance to the objects intended, as the
Chinese signs now are.
[Sidenote: Hieratic and Demotic writing.]
The ancient Egyptians had two ways of quick writing, the Hieratic (or
priestly), which was employed for the sacred writings only, and the
Demotic, used by the people, which was employed for law-papers, letters,
and all writing that did not touch on religious matter or enter into the
province of the priest. Yet, though literature increased and writing was
much practised by people engaged in the ordinary business of life (we
see pictures on the tombs of the great man’s upper servant seated before
his desk and recording with reed-pen and ink-horn the numbers of the
flocks and herds belonging to the farm), little was done to simplify the
art of writing by the ancient Egyptians. Down to the latest times when
Hieroglyphics were cut, and Demotic and Hieratic characters written, the
same confusing variety of signs were employed--pictorial, ideographic,
symbolic, phonetic--all mixed up together, with nothing to distinguish
them but the determinative signs before spoken of, which themselves
added a new element to the complexity.
It was left for a less conservative and more enterprising people than
the ancient Egyptians to take the last and greatest step in perfecting
the invention which the ancient
[Sidenote: The Phœnician alphabet.]
Egyptians had brought so far on its road, and by throwing away all the
first attempts, to allow the serviceable, successful parts of the system
to stand out clear. The Phœnicians, to whom tradition points as the
introducers of our alphabet into Europe, and who, during early ages,
were in very close political and trading connection with the ancient
Egyptians, are now believed to be the authors of the improvement by
which we benefit. They did not invent the alphabet which the Greeks
learned from them; they could have had no reason to invent signs, when
they must have been well acquainted with the superabundance that had
been in use for centuries before they began to build their cities by the
sea-shore. What they probably did was to choose from the Egyptian
characters, with which all the traders of the world must have been
familiar, just so many phonemes or sound-carrying signs as represented
the sounds of which their speech was made up; and rejecting all others,
they kept strictly to these chosen ones in all their future writings.
This was a great work to have accomplished, and we must not suppose that
it was done by one man, or even in one generation; as probably it took a
very long time to perfect the separation between vowels and consonants:
a distinction which had already been made by the ancient Egyptians, for
they had vowel signs, though, as before remarked, they constantly made
their consonants carry the vowels, and spelt words with consonants
alone. You will remember that consonants are the most important elements
of language, and constitute, as we have said before, the bones of words;
but also that distinctions of time, person, and case depend in an early
stage of language very much on vowels; and you will therefore understand
how important to clearness of expression it was to have clearly defined
separate signs for the vowels and diphthongs that had, so to speak, all
the exactitude of meaning in their keeping. The Phœnicians, of all
the people in the early world, were most in need of a clear and precise
method of writing: for, being the great traders and settlers of ancient
times, one of its principal uses would be to enable them to communicate
with friends at a distance by means of writings which should convey the
thoughts of the absent ones, or the private instructions of a trader to
his partner without need of an interpreter.
The advantages of simplicity and clearness had been less felt by
Egyptian priests while inscribing their stately records on walls of
temples and palaces, and on the tapering sides of obelisks which were
meant to lift sacred words up to the eye of Heaven rather than to expose
them to those of men. They believed that a race of priests would
continue, as long as the temples and obelisks continued, who could
explain the writing to those worthy to enter into its mysteries; and
they were not sorry, perhaps, to keep the distinction of understanding
the art of letters to their own caste.
It was not till letters were needed by busy people, who had other things
to do besides studying, that the necessity for making them easy to
learn, and really effective as carriers of thought across distances, was
sincerely felt. Two conjectures as to the method pursued by the
Phœnicians in choosing their letters and adapting them to their own
language have been made by the learned. One is, that while they took the
forms of their letters from the Egyptian system of signs, and adopted
the principle of making each picture of an object stand for the first
sound of its name, as _labo_ for _l_, they did not give to each letter
the value it had in the Egyptian alphabet, but allowed it to mean for
them the first sound of its name in their own language. For example,
they took the sign for an ox’s head and made it stand for the sound
_a_, not because it was one of the Egyptian signs for ‘_a_’ but because
Aleph was the name for an ox and ‘_a_’ was its first syllable. This,
which seems a natural method enough, is, however, not the method which
was followed by the Japanese in choosing their alphabet from signs; and
more recent investigations prove such a close resemblance between the
earliest forms of Phœnician letters, and early forms of signs for the
same sounds in Hieratic character, that a complete descent in
sound-bearing power, as well as in form, is now claimed for our letters
from those hieroglyphics, which, in our ignorance of the relationship,
we used to consider a synonymous term for something unintelligible. The
Semitic language spoken by the Phœnicians was richer in sounds than
the less developed language spoken by the ancient Egyptians; but as the
Egyptians used several signs for each letter, the Phœnicians easily
fell into the habit of giving a slightly different value to two forms
originally identical, and thus provided for all the more delicate
distinctions of their tongue. A close comparison of the forms of the
letters of the earliest known Canaanite inscriptions with Hieratic
writing of the time of the Old Empire reveals a resemblance so striking
between fifteen of the Phœnician letters and Hieratic characters
carrying the same sounds, that a conviction of the derivation of one
from the other impresses itself on even a careless observer. The
correspondence of the other five Canaanite letters with their Hieratic
counterparts is less obvious to the uneducated eye, but experts in such
investigations see sufficient likeness even there to confirm the theory.
The gradual divergence of the Phœnician characters from their
Hieratic parents is easily accounted for by the difference of the
material and the instrument employed by the Phœnicians and Egyptians
in writing. The Hieratic charracter was painted by Egyptian priests on
smooth papyrus leaves with a brush or broad pointed reed pen. The
Canaanite inscriptions are graven with a sharp instrument on hard stone,
and as a natural consequence the round curves of the Hieratic character
become sharp points, and there is a general simplification of form and a
throwing aside of useless lines and dots, the last remnants of the
picture from which each Hieratic character originally sprang. The
_names_ given later to the Phœnician letters, Aleph, an ‘ox;’ Beth, a
‘house;’ Gimel, a ‘camel;’ Daleth, a ‘door;’ are not the names of the
objects from which the forms of these letters were originally taken. The
Hieratic ‘A’ was taken from the picture of an eagle, which stood for ‘A’
in hieroglyphics; ‘B’ was originally a sort of heron; ‘D,’ a hand with
the fingers spread out. New names were given by the Phœnicians to the
forms they had borrowed, from fancied resemblances to objects which, in
their language, began with the sound intended, when the original
Egyptian names had been forgotten. It is hard for us to see a likeness
between our letter ‘A’ and an ox’s horns with a yoke across; or between
‘B’ and the ground-plan of a house; ‘G’ and a camel’s head and neck; ‘M’
and water; ‘W’ and a set of teeth; ‘P’ and the back of a head set on the
neck; but our letters have gone through a great deal of straightening
and putting into order since they came into Europe and were sent out on
their further westward travels. The reader who has an opportunity of
examining early specimens of letters on Greek coins will find a freedom
of treatment which makes them much more suggestive of resemblances, and
the earlier Phœnician letters were, no doubt, more pictorial still.
The interesting and important thing to be remembered concerning our
letters is that each one of them was, without doubt, a picture once, and
gets its shape in no other way than by having once stood for an object,
whose name in the ancient people’s language began with the sound it
conveys to us.
These Phœnician letters, born on the walls of Egyptian tombs older
than Abraham, and selected by Phœnician traders who took their boats
up to Memphis at or before Joseph’s time, are the parents of all the
alphabets now used in the world, with the exception of that one which
the Japanese have taken from Chinese picture-writing. The Phœnicians
carried their alphabet about with them to all the countries where they
planted trading settlements, and it was adopted by Greeks, and by the
Latins from the Greeks, and then gradually modified to suit the
languages of all the civilized peoples of east and west.[138] The Hebrew
square letters are a form of divergence from the original type, and even
the Sanskrit character in all its various styles can be traced back to
the same source by experts who have studied the transformations through
which it has passed in the course of ages. It is, of course, easy to
understand that these ubiquitous little shapes which through so many
centuries have had the task laid on them of spelling words in so many
different languages must have undergone some variations in their values
to suit the tongues that interpreted them.
The original family of twenty letters have not always kept together, or
avoided the intrusion of new comers. Some of the languages they have had
to express, being in an early
[Sidenote: Runes.]
stage of development, have not wanted even so many as twenty letters,
and have gradually allowed some of them to fall into disuse and be
forgotten; an instance of this we find in the alphabet of the northern
nations--the Gothic--which consisted only of sixteen _runes_--called by
new names; they have been handed down either directly from the Greek, or
from the Greek through the Roman alphabet, and furnished with mystic
meanings and with names peculiar to themselves.
[Sidenote: Additional letters.]
In languages where nicer distinctions of sound were called for than the
original twenty Phœnician signs carried, a few fresh letters were
added, but in no case has any quite new form been invented. The added
letters have always been a modification of one of the older
forms--either a letter cut in half, or one modified by an additional
stroke or dot. In this way the Romans made _G_ out of _C_, by adding a
stroke to one of its horns. _V_ and _U_, _I_ and _J_ were originally
slightly different ways of writing one letter, which have been taken
advantage of to express a new sound when the necessity for a greater
number of sound-signs arose; _W_, as its very name shows, is only a
doubled form of _V_. At first sight it seems a simple thing enough to
invent a letter, but let us remember that such a thing as an arbitrarily
invented letter does not exist anywhere. To create one out of nothing is
a feat of which human ingenuity does not seem capable. Every single
letter in use anywhere (we can hardly dwell on this thought too long)
has descended in regular steps from the pictured object in whose name
the sound it represents originally dwelt. Shape and sound were wedded
together in early days by the first beginners of writing, and all the
labour bestowed on them since has only been in the way of modification
and adaptation to changed circumstances. No wonder that, when people
believed a whole alphabet to have been invented straight off, they also
thought that it took a god to do it. Thoth, the Great-and-great, with
his emblems of justice and his recording pencil; Oannes, the
Sea-monster, to whom all the wonders of the under-world lay open; Swift
Hermes, with his cap of invisibility and his magic staff; One-eyed Odin,
while his dearly purchased draught of wisdom-water was inspiring him
still. No one indeed--as we see plainly enough now--but a hero like one
of these, was equal to the task of inventing an alphabet.
[Sidenote: Cuneiform writing.]
Before we have quite done with alphabets, we ought to speak of another
system of ancient writing, the cuneiform; which, though it has left no
trace of itself on modern alphabets, is the vehicle which preserves some
of the most interesting and ancient records in the world. The cuneiform
or arrow-shaped character used by the ancient Chaldeans, Assyrians,
Babylonians, and Persians, is supposed to owe its peculiar form to the
material on which it was habitually graven by those who employed it. It
arose in a country where the temples were built of unburned brick
instead of stone, and the wedge-shaped form of the lines composing the
letters is precisely what would be most easily produced on wet clay by
the insertion and rapid withdrawal of a blunt-pointed stick or reed.
Like all other systems, it began in rude pictures, which gradually came
to have a phonetic value, in the same manner as did the Egyptian
hieroglyphics. The earliest records in this character are graven on the
unburned bricks of pyramidal-shaped temples, which a little before the
time of Abraham began to be built by a nation composed of mixed Shemite,
Cushite, and Scythian (_i.e._ Turanian) peoples round the shores of the
Persian Gulf. The invention of the character is ascribed in the records
to the Turanian race, the Accadians, who are always designated by the
sign of a wedge, which was equivalent to calling them the writers, or
the literary people. The Accadians discovered this writing; but it was
taken up and wrought to much greater perfection by their successors, the
Shemites. In their hands it became the vehicle in which the history of
the two great empires of Babylon and Nineveh, and the achievements of
ancient Persian kings, have come down to us. For when Nineveh fell
before the Persians, they adopted the cuneiform writing of the
Assyrians.
We have all seen and wondered at the minute writing on the Assyrian
marbles and tablets in the British Museum, and stood in awe before the
human-headed monster gods--
‘Their flanks with dark runes fretted o’er,’
whose fate, in surviving the ruin of so many empires, and being brought
from so far to enlighten us on the history of past ages, can never cease
to astonish us. When we look at them again, let us spare a thought to
the history of the character itself. Its mysteries have cost even
greater labour to unravel than hieroglyphics themselves. To the latest
times of the use of cuneiform by the Achæmenidæ, pictorial, symbolic,
and phonetic groups continued to be mixed together, and a system of
determinative signs was employed to show the reader in what sense each
word was to be taken. But this system of writing never reached the
perfection attained by the Egyptian hieroglyphs. It never advanced to
the use of what may be called true letters, never beyond the use of
syllabic signs. So that in time it was superseded by alphabets descended
from the Egyptian. The symbolism, too, of the cuneiform writing is very
complex, and the difficulty of reading the signs used phonetically is
greatly increased by the fact of the language from which they acquired
their values (a Turanian one) being different from the Semitic tongue,
in which the most important records are written.
Of other systems of writing, chiefly pictorial, known in the ancient
world, such as the Hittite and the Cypriot--or, again, of the
picture-writing of many other savage tribes beside the North American
Indians, it is not necessary to speak. For we are not writing a history
of alphabets, but of the acquisition of the _art_ of writing by
mankind.