The Phoenician traders did the same thing.
They borrowed a few pictures from the Egyptian hieroglyphics and
simplified a number of wedge-shaped figures from the Babylonians.
They sacrificed the pretty looks of the older system for the benefit of
speed and they reduced the thousands of images of the ancient world to a
short and handy alphabet of only twenty-two letters. They tried it out
at home and when it proved a success, they carried it abroad.
Among the Egyptians and the Babylonians, writing had been a very serious
affair--something almost holy. Many improvements had been proposed but
these had been invariably discarded as sacrilegious innovations. The
Phoenicians who were not interested in piety succeeded where the others
had failed. They could not introduce their script into Mesopotamia and
Egypt, but among the people of the Mediterranean, who were totally
ignorant of the art of writing, the Phoenician alphabet was a great
success and in all nooks and corners of that vast sea we find vases and
pillars and ruins covered with Phoenician inscriptions.
The Indo-European Greeks who had migrated to the many islands of the
Aegean Sea at once applied this foreign alphabet to their own language.
Certain Greek sounds, unknown to the ears of the Semitic Phoenicians,
needed letters of their own. These were invented and added to
the others.
But the Greeks did not stop at this.
They improved the whole system of speech-recording.
All the systems of writing of the ancient people of Asia had one thing
in common.
The consonants were reproduced but the reader was forced to guess at the
vowels.
This is not as difficult as it seems.
We often omit the vowels in advertisements and in announcements which
are printed in our newspapers. Journalists and telegraph operators, too,
are apt to invent languages of their own which do away with all the
superfluous vowels and use only such consonants as are necessary to
provide a skeleton around which the vowels can be draped when the story
is rewritten.
But such an imperfect scheme of writing can never become popular, and
the Greeks, with their sense of order, added a number of extra signs to
reproduce the "a" and the "e" and the "i" and the "o" and the "u." When
this had been done, they possessed an alphabet which allowed them to
write everything in almost every language.
Five centuries before the birth of Christ these letters crossed the
Adriatic and wandered from Athens to Rome.
The Roman soldiers carried them to the furthest corners of western
Europe and taught our own ancestors the use of the little
Phoenician signs.
Twelve centuries later, the missionaries of Byzantine took the alphabet
into the dreary wilderness of the dark Russian plain.
Today more than half of the people of the world use this Asiatic
alphabet to keep a record of their thoughts and to preserve a record of
their knowledge for the benefit of their children and their
grandchildren.