WRITING.
Picture-writing, 168—Sound-pictures, 169—Chinese Writing,
170—Cuneiform Writing, 172—Egyptian Writing, 173—Alphabetic
Writing, 175—Spelling, 178—Printing, 180.
Taught as we are to read and write in early childhood, we hardly realize
the place this wondrous double art fills in civilized life, till we
see how it strikes the barbarian who has not even a notion that such
a thing can be. John Williams, the South Sea Island missionary, tells
how once being busy carpentering, and having forgotten his square, he
wrote a message for it with a bit of charcoal on a chip, and sent this
to his wife by a native chief, who, amazed to find that the chip could
talk without a mouth, for long afterwards carried it hung by a string
round his neck, and told his wondering countrymen what he saw it do. So
in South Africa a black messenger carrying a letter has been known to
hide it under a stone while he loitered by the way, lest it should tell
tales of him, as it did of whatever was going on. Yet the art of writing,
mysterious as it seemed to these rude men, was itself developed by a few
steps of invention, which if not easy to make, are at any rate easy to
understand when made. Even uncivilized races have made the first step,
that of picture-writing. Had the missionary merely made a sketch of his
L-square on the chip, it would have carried his message, and the native
would have understood the whole business as a matter of course. Beginning
at this primitive stage, it will be possible to follow thence through its
whole course the history of writing and printing.
[Illustration: FIG. 47.—Picture-writing, rock near Lake Superior (after
Schoolcraft.)]
[Illustration: FIG. 48.—_Pater noster_ in Mexican picture-writing (after
Aubin).]
Fig. 47 shows a specimen of picture-writing as used by the hunting
tribes of North America. It records an expedition across Lake Superior,
led by a chief who is shown on horseback with his magical drumstick in
his hand. There were in all fifty-one men in five canoes, the first of
them being led by the chief’s ally, whose name, Kishkemunazee, that is,
Kingfisher, is shown by the drawing of this bird. Their reaching the
other side seems to be shown by the land-tortoise, the well-known emblem
of land, while by the picture of three suns under the sky it is recorded
that the crossing took three days. Now most of this, childlike in its
simplicity, consists in making pictures of the very objects meant to be
talked of. But there are devices which go beyond this mere imitation.
Thus when the tortoise is put to represent land, it is no longer a mere
imitation, but has become an emblem or symbol. And where the bird is
drawn to mean not a real kingfisher, but a man of that name, we see the
first step toward phonetic writing or sound writing, the principle of
which is to make a picture stand for the sound of a spoken word. How men
may have made the next move toward writing may be learnt from the common
child’s game of _rebus_, that is, writing words “by things.” Like many
other games, this one keeps up in child’s sport what in earlier ages was
man’s earnest. Thus if one writes the word “waterman” by a picture of a
water-jug and a man, this is drawing the meaning of the word in a way
hardly beyond the American Indian’s picture of the kingfisher. But it is
very different when in a child’s book of puzzles one finds the drawing
of a water-can, a man being shot, and a date-fruit, this representing
in rebus the word “can-di-date.” For now what the pictures have come to
stand for is no longer their meaning, but their mere sound. This is true
phonetic writing, though of a rude kind, and shows how the practical art
of writing really came to be invented. This invention seems to have been
made more than once, and in somewhat different ways. The old Mexicans,
before the arrival of the Spaniards, had got so far as to spell their
names of persons and places by pictures, rebus fashion. Even when they
began to be Christianized, they contrived to use their picture-writing
for the Latin words of their new religion. Thus they painted a flag
(_pan_), a stone (_te_), a prickly-pear (_noch_) (Fig. 48), which were
together pronounced _pa-te-noch-te_, and served to spell _pater noster_,
in a way that was tolerably exact for Mexicans who had no _r_ in their
language. In the same way they ended the prayer with the picture of water
(_a_), and aloe (_me_), to express _amen_.
This leads on to a more important system of writing. Looking at the
ordinary Chinese characters on tea chests or vases, one would hardly
think they ever had to do with pictures of things. But there are
fortunately preserved certain early Chinese characters, known as the
“ancient pictures,” which show how what were at first distinctly formed
sketches of objects came to be dashed off in a few strokes of the
rabbit’s-hair pencil, till they passed into the meaningless-looking
cursive forms now in use, as is seen in Fig. 49.
[Illustration: FIG. 49.—Chinese ancient pictures and later cursive forms
(after Endlicher).]
[Illustration: FIG. 50.—Chinese compound characters, pictures and sounds.]
The Chinese did not stop short at making such mere pictures of objects,
which goes but little way toward writing. The inventors of the present
mode of Chinese writing wanted to represent the spoken sounds, but
here they were put in a difficulty by their language consisting of
monosyllables, so that one word has many different meanings. To meet
this they devised an ingenious plan of making compound characters, or
“pictures and sounds,” in which one part gives the sound, while the other
gives the sense. To give an idea of this, suppose it were agreed that
a picture of a box should stand for the sound _box_. As, however, this
sound has several meanings, some sign must be added to show which is
intended. Thus a key might be drawn beside it to show it is a _box_ to
put things in, or a leaf if it is to mean the plant called _box_, or a
hand if it is intended for a _box_ on the ear, or a whip would show that
it was to signify the _box_ of a coach. This would be for us a clumsy
proceeding, but it would be a great advance beyond mere picture-writing,
as it would make sure at once of the sound and the meaning. Thus
in Chinese, the sound _chow_ has various meanings, as ship, fluff,
flickering, basin, loquacity. Therefore the character which represents a
ship, _chow_, which is placed first in Fig. 50, is repeated afterwards
with additional characters to show which particular meaning of _chow_ is
intended. A recognisable pair of feathers is placed by it to mean _chow_
= fluff; next, the sign of fire makes it _chow_ = flickering; next, the
sign of water makes it _chow_ = basin; and lastly, the character for
speech is joined to it to make _chow_ = loquacity. These examples, though
far from explaining the whole mystery of Chinese writing, give some idea
of the principles of its sound-characters and keys or determinative
signs, and show why a Chinese has to master such an immensely complicated
set of characters in order to write his own language. To have introduced
such a method of writing was an effort of inventive genius in the
ancient Chinese, which their modern descendants show their respect for
by refusing to improve upon it. At the same time it is not entirely
through conservatism that they have not taken to phonetic writing like
that of the western nations, for this would for instance confuse the
various kinds of _chow_ which their present characters enable them to
keep separate. But the Japanese, whose language was better suited than
the Chinese for being written phonetically, actually made themselves
a phonetic system out of the Chinese characters. Selecting certain of
these, they cut them down into signs to express sounds, one to stand for
_i_, another for _ro_, another for _fa_, &c. Thus a set of forty-seven
such characters (which they call accordingly the _irofa_), serve as the
foundation of a system with which they write Japanese by sound more
accurately than our writing conveys it.
Next, as to the cuneiform writing, such as is to be seen at the British
Museum on the huge man-headed bulls of Nineveh, or on the flat baked
bricks which were pages of books in the library of Sennacherib. The
marks like wedges or arrow-heads arranged in groups and rows do not look
much like pictures of objects. Yet there is evidence that they came at
first from picture-writing; for instance, the sun was represented by a
rude figure of it made by four strokes arranged round. Of the groups of
characters in an inscription, some serve directly to represent objects,
as man, woman, river, house, while other groups are read phonetically
as standing for syllables. The inventors of this ancient system appear
to have belonged to the Akkadian group of nations, the founders of
early Babylonian civilization. In later ages the Assyrians and Persians
learned to write their languages by cuneiform characters, in inscriptions
which remain to this day as their oldest records. But the cuneiform
writing was cumbrous in the extreme, and had to give way when it came
into competition with the alphabet. To understand the origin of that
invention, it is necessary to go back to a plan of writing which dates
from antiquity probably even higher than the cuneiform of Babylonia,
namely, the hieroglyphics of Egypt.
[Illustration]
The earliest known hieroglyphic inscriptions of Egypt belong to a period
approaching 3,000 B.C. Even at this ancient time the plan of writing was
so far developed that the scribes had the means of spelling any word
phonetically, when they chose. But though the Egyptians had thus come
to writing by sound, they only trusted to it in part, combining it with
signs which are evidently remains of earlier picture-writing. Thus the
mere pictures of an ox, a star, a pair of sandals, may stand for ox,
star, sandals. Even where they spelt words by their sounds, they had
a remarkable way of adding what are called determinatives, which are
pictures to confirm or explain the meaning of the spelt word. One short
sentence given as an example from Renouf’s _Egyptian Grammar_, shows all
these devices. The meaning is: “I (am) the Sun-god coming forth from the
horizon against his enemies.” Here part of the pictures of animals and
things are letters to be read into Egyptian words, as shown underneath.
But others are still real pictures, intended to stand for what they
represent. The sun is shown by his picture, with a one-mark below, and
followed by the battle-axe which is the symbol of divinity, while further
on comes a picture of the horizon with the sun on it. Beside these, some
of the figures are determinative pictures to explain the words, the verb
to walk being followed by an explanatory pair of legs, and the word enemy
having the picture of an enemy after it, and then three strokes, the sign
of plurality. It seems that the Egyptians began with mere picture-writing
like that of the barbarous tribes of America, and though in after ages
they came to use some figures as phonetic characters or letters, they
never had the strength of mind to rely on them entirely, but went on
using the old pictures as well. How they were led to make a picture stand
for a sound is not hard to see. In the figure a character may be noticed
which is read R. This is an outline of an open mouth, and indeed is often
used to represent a mouth; but the Egyptian word for mouth being RO, the
sign came to be used as a character or letter to spell the sound RO or R
wherever it was wanted. So much of the history of the art of writing may
thus be read in a single hieroglyphic sentence.
These carefully drawn hieroglyphic or “sacred-sculpture” pictures, used
as they were for the solemn records of church and state, were kept up
for sacred purposes into the time of the Greek dynasty, and even the
Roman empire in Egypt. Indeed after the secret of deciphering them had
been lost for many ages, the names of Ptolemy and Cleopatra were among
the first identified by Dr. Thomas Young. But from very ancient times
the Egyptian scribes, finding the elaborate pictures too troublesome
for business writing on papyrus, brought them down (much as the
Chinese did theirs) to a few quick strokes. These were the “hieratic”
characters, a few of which are seen in the second column of Fig. 51
following their hieroglyphic originals. Yet even when they used these,
the Egyptian scribes never freed themselves from the trammels of their
early picture-writing, so as to do away with the unnecessary multitude
of phonetic signs, and drop the determinative pictures as useless. This
great move was made by foreigners.
Tacitus, in a passage of his _Annals_ describing the origin of letters,
says that the Egyptians first depicted thoughts of the mind by figures of
animals, which oldest monuments of human memory are to be seen stamped
on the rocks, so that they (the Egyptians) appear as the inventors
of letters, which the Phœnician navigators brought thence to Greece,
obtaining the glory as if they had discovered what they really borrowed.
This account may be substantially true, but it does not give the
Phœnicians credit for their practical good sense, which they were able to
follow, being strangers and not bound by the sacred traditions of Egypt.
No doubt the Phœnicians (or some other Semitic nation), when they learnt
the Egyptian hieroglyphics, saw that the picture-signs mixed with the
spelt words had become mere surplusage, and that all they really wanted
was a small number of signs to write the sound of their words with.
Thus was invented the earliest so-called Phœnician alphabet. Some of
its letters may have been actually copied from the Egyptian characters,
as is seen by Fig. 51, which shows a selection from the compared set
drawn up by De Rougé, so arranged as to pass from the original Egyptian
hieroglyphic to its hieratic form in the current writing, and thence to
the corresponding letter of the Phœnician alphabet, with its value in our
letters and examples of similar letters in other well known forms of the
alphabet.
[Illustration: FIG. 51.—Egyptian hieroglyphic and hieratic characters
compared with letters of Phœnician and later alphabets (after De Rougé).]
It seems to have been about the tenth century B.C., that the original
alphabet was made, forms of which were used by the Moabites, Phœnicians,
Israelites, and other nations of the Semitic family to write their
languages. A curious proof that it was among these Semitic nations that
the _alphabet_ was first shaped, has come down to us in its name. To
understand this, it has to be noticed that the letters were named, each
by a word beginning with it. The Hebrew forms of these names are familiar
to English readers from Psalm cxix., where they stand in their order
_aleph_ or “ox” for _a_, _beth_ or “house” for _b_, _gimel_ or “camel”
for _g_, and so on. This is a natural way of naming letters; indeed our
Anglo-Saxon ancestors had another such set of names belonging to the
rune-letters they used in old times, calling their letter _b_, _beorc_ or
“birch,” their letter _m_, _man_, their letter _th_, _thorn_. Now what
confirms the history that the Phœnicians had the alphabet first and the
Greeks learnt the art of writing from them, is that the Greeks actually
borrowed the Phœnician names for the letters, which were like the Hebrew
ones just given, and which in Greek passed into the well-known forms
_alpha_, _beta_, _gamma_, &c. Thence comes the word _alphabet_, which
thus preserves the traces of the letters having been made and named by
the Phœnicians, having passed from them to the Greeks and Latins, and
at last came down to us. It is interesting to look through a book of
alphabets, where not only may be traced the history of the Greek and
Latin letters, and others plainly related to them, such as the Gothic
and Slavonic, but it may even be made out that others at first sight so
unlike as the Northmen’s runes and the Sanskrit characters, must all
be descendants of the primitive alphabet. Thus the Brahman writes his
Veda, the Moslem his Koran, the Jew his Old and the Christian his New
Testament, in signs which had their origin in the pictures on temple
walls in ancient Egypt.
Such changes, however, have taken place in writing, that it often
requires most careful comparison to trace them. If one showed a Chinese
an English note scribbled in modern handwriting, it would not be quite
easy to prove to him that the characters were derived from old Phœnician
ones such as those in Fig. 51. Our running-hand must be traced back
through copybook-hand, and from small letters to Roman capitals, and so
further back. Readers will find this worth doing as an exercise. They may
also be recommended to look at old-fashioned English writing, such as a
Parish Register of the 16th century, which will show how much more the
writing of that period was like the crabbed hand in which it is still
thought proper to write German. We English fortunately learnt a simpler
and better style from the Italian writing-masters, who taught us the
“Roman hand” which Malvolio recognizes in _Twelfth Night_. Alterations
in letters were not only made for convenience, but also for decoration.
Thus among the scribes of the middle ages there arose fanciful varieties
such as what we call Old English and Black Letter, and still use for
ornamental purposes. This style of manuscript being in fashion when
printing was introduced in Europe, English books were at first printed
in it, as many German books are still. One has only to read a page of a
German book so printed to satisfy oneself how great a gain of clearness
it was to discard these letters with forms broken by unmeaning lines, and
return to the more distinct Latin letters we now use.
Beside these general changes of alphabet, the history of writing shows
how from time to time alterations have been made as to particular
letters. The original Phœnician alphabet was weak in vowels, in a way
which the learner of Hebrew can understand when he tries to read it
without the vowel points, which are more modern marks put on for the
benefit of those who do not know the language well enough to tell how
each word should be pronounced. The Phœnician alphabet did not altogether
suit the writers of Greek and Latin, who altered some letters and made
new ones in order to write their languages more perfectly, and thus
other nations have made free in adding, dropping, and altering letters
and their sounds, to get the means required for each to express its own
tongue. To such causes may be traced letters not known to the primitive
alphabet, such as Greek Ω and English W, which are explained by their
names of Omega or “great-O,” and “double-U.” The digamma or Ϝ fell out
of use in Greek, and the two valuable Anglo-Saxon _th_-letters, ð and Þ,
are lost to modern English. The letters Η and Χ are examples of letters
which in Greek served purposes other than those English uses them for.
By arranging their alphabets to suit the sounds of their languages,
nations contrive with more or fewer letters to spell with some accuracy,
Italian managing this fairly with twenty-two letters, while Russian uses
thirty-six. English has an alphabet of twenty-six letters, but works them
without regular system, so that our spelling and pronunciation disagree
at every turn. One cause of this state of things has been the attempt
to keep up side by side two different spellings, English and French, as
where _g_ is used to spell both the English word _get_ and the French
word _gentle_. Another cause has been the attempt to keep up ancient
sounds in writing, although they have been dropped in speaking; thus in
_throuGH_, _casTle_, _sCene_, the now silent letters are relics of sounds
which used to be really heard in Anglo-Saxon _thurH_, Latin _casTellum_,
Greek _sKēnē_. What makes this the more perplexing is, that in many words
English writing does simply try to spell what is actually spoken; English
_tail_ does not keep up the lost guttural of Anglo-Saxon _tæ̂gel_, nor
does English _palsy_ retain letters for the sounds that have vanished
in its derivation from French _paralysie_. Our wrong spelling is the
result not of rule but of want of rule, and among its most curious cases
are those where the grammarians have managed to put both sound and
etymology wrong at once, writing _island_, _rhyme_, _scythe_, where their
forefathers rationally wrote _iland_, _rime_, _sithe_. It is reckoned
that on an average, a year of an English child’s education is wasted in
overcoming the defects of the present mode of spelling.
The invention of writing was the great movement by which mankind rose
from barbarism to civilization. How vast its effect was, may be best
measured by looking at the low condition of tribes still living without
it, dependent on memory for their traditions and rules of life, and
unable to amass knowledge as we do by keeping records of events, and
storing up new observations for the use of future generations. Thus it
is no doubt right to draw the line between barbarian and civilized
where the art of writing comes in, for this gives permanence to history,
law, and science. Such knowledge so goes with writing, that when a man
is spoken of as learned, we at once take it to mean that he has read
many books, which are the main source men learn from. Already in ancient
times, as compositions of value came to be written, there sprang up a
class of copyists or transcribers, whose business was to multiply books.
In Alexandria or Rome one could go to the bibliopole or bookseller and
buy a manuscript of Demosthenes or Livy, and in later ages the copying
of religious books splendidly illuminated, became a common occupation,
especially in monasteries. But manuscripts were costly, only the few
scholars could read them, and so no doubt it would have remained had not
a new art come in to multiply writing.
This was a process simple enough in itself, and indeed well known from
remote ages. Every Egyptian or Babylonian who smeared some black on his
signet-ring or engraved cylinder, and took off a copy, had made the
first step towards printing. But easy as the further application now
seems to us, no one in the Old World saw it. It appears to have been the
Chinese who invented the plan of engraving a whole page of characters on
a wood-block and printing off many copies. They may have begun as early
as the sixth century, and at any rate in the tenth century they were
busy printing books. The Chinese writing, from its enormous diversity of
characters, is not well suited to printing by movable types, but there is
a record that this plan was early devised among them, having been carried
on with separate terra-cotta types in the eleventh century. Moslem
writers early in the fourteenth century describe Chinese printing, so
that it was probably through them that the art found its way to Europe,
where not long afterwards the so-called “block-books,” printed from
whole page wood-blocks after the Chinese manner, make their appearance,
followed by books printed with movable types. Few questions have been
more debated by antiquaries than the claims of Gutenberg, Faust, and
the others to their share of honour as the inventors of printing. Great
as was the service these worthies did to the world, it is only fair to
remember that what they did was but to improve the practical application
of a Chinese invention. Since their time progress has been made in
cheapening types, making paper by machinery, improving the presses, and
working them by steam-power, but the idea remains the same. Such is, in
few words, the history of the art of printing, to which perhaps, more
than to any other influence, is due the difference of our modern life
from that of the middle ages.
In examining these methods of writing, we began with the rude hunter’s
pictures, passing on to the Egyptian’s use of a picture to represent the
sound of its name, then to the breaking down of the picture into a mere
sound-sign, till in this last stage the connexion between figure and
sound becomes so apparently arbitrary, that the child has to be taught,
this sign stands for A, this for B. In curious contrast with this is the
modern invention of the phonograph, where the actual sound spoken into
the vibrating diaphragm marks indentations in the travelling strip of
tinfoil, by which the diaphragm can be afterwards caused to repeat the
vibrations and re-utter the sound. When one listens to the tones coming
forth from the strip of foil, the South Sea Islander’s fancy of the
talking chip seems hardly unreasonable.