1. _Pictographs._—Pictures or actual representations of objects.
2. _Ideograms._—Pictorial symbols, which are used to suggest
objects or abstract ideas.
_Phonograms._—Graphic symbols of sounds. They have usually arisen
out of conventionalised ideograms, which have been taken to
represent sounds instead of things.
3. (_A._) Verbal signs, representing entire words.
4. (_B._) Syllabic signs which stand for the articulations of
which words are composed.
5. _Alphabetic Signs_ or _Letters_, which represent the elementary
sounds into which the syllable can be resolved.
1. The least advanced of men can convey information, that is, they can
write by means of _Pictographs_.
2. Probably all of them also employ more or fewer symbols or
_Ideograms_, such as the depicting of a turtle for “land” by the North
American Indians.
The next stage is that in which from pictures which represent things or
ideas were derived pictures which represent sounds or _Phonograms_.
Our children, of their own initiative, to amuse themselves, pass
through the two earlier stages of writing. The stage we are now
considering is a common amusement for children, in the kind of
conundrum known as the _rebus_. “In the _rebus_ the picture of an
object is taken to denote any word or part of a word which has the
same sound as the name of the thing pictured. As in the well-known
_rebus_ in which the sentence, ‘I saw a boy swallow a gooseberry,’ is
represented by pictures of an eye, a saw, a boy, a swallow, a goose,
and a berry. If, for instance, like the ancient Egyptians, we were to
adopt a circle with a central dot as our ordinary written symbol for
the sun, this would be an ideogram. But if we were to go on, and after
the Egyptian or Chinese method, were to use the same symbol to express
also the word ‘son,’ we should have a phonogram of that primitive type
which has repeatedly served to bridge over the gap between picture
ideograms and phonetic characters.”
3. In all languages there are certain monosyllabic words which are
pronounced alike, but which have different significations, for
example, stork, stalk (noun and verb). In order to indicate which was
intended in phonography, it would be necessary to add a determinative
or explanatory ideogram. Thus, if a figure of the bird represented
the first, the same figure of a bird with a flower or some leaves by
its side would indicate a stalk, and a pair of legs by the side of
another bird would determinate the action of stalking. The Chinese to
the present day write in this cumbrous way, as used to do the ancient
Egyptians and Assyrians.
There is no need, however, to invent a _rebus_ to show what one is
when Egyptian hieroglyphics are full of them. I take the following
from Dr. Isaac Taylor. The picture of a lute was used symbolically by
the Egyptian scribes to denote “excellence.” It then came to stand as
a phonogram to express the word _nefer_, “good.” But in the Egyptian
language this sound represented two homophonic [similarly pronounced]
words, _nefer_, “good,” and _nefer_, “as far as.” Hence we find that
the character may be used as a pictorial ideogram [pictograph] to
represent a lute, and as a symbolic ideogram to mean excellence; then
as a phonogram for the preposition _nefer_, and lastly as a syllabic
sign to denote _ne_, the first syllable of the word _nefer_.
4. The problem of phonetic denotation having thus been solved, the
syllabic signs were combined so as to form compound phonograms on the
principle of the _rebus_. For example, the name of lapis lazuli was
_khesteb_. Now the word _khesf_ meant to “stop,” and the syllable _teb_
denoted a “pig.” Hence the _rebus_ “stop-pig” was invented to express
graphically the name of lapis lazuli, and this is figured by the
picture of a man stopping a pig by pulling at its tail.
The Japanese system of writing illustrates the later development. They
learnt the art of writing from the Chinese, but as their language is
polysyllabic, while the Chinese is essentially monosyllabic, “the
Chinese characters which are verbal phonograms could only be used for
the expression of the polysyllabic Japanese words by being treated
as syllabic signs. A number of characters sufficient to constitute
a syllabary having been selected from the numerous Chinese verbal
phonograms, it was found that the whole apparatus of determinatives (or
‘keys,’ radicals, or ‘primitives,’ as they are termed in describing
Chinese writing) might be rejected, being no longer indispensable to
the reader. By these two changes an almost incredible simplification
of the Chinese writing was effected. But though syllabism is a great
advance on a system of verbal phonograms, yet it is necessarily
somewhat cumbrous, owing to the considerable number of characters which
are required.”
Although the Japanese have invented one of the best syllabaries which
has ever been constructed, the development stopped short there. “The
fact that during more than a thousand years it should never have
occurred to a people so ingenious and inventive as the Japanese to
develop their syllabary into an alphabet, may suffice to show that the
discovery of the alphabetic principle of writing is not such an easy or
obvious a matter as might be supposed.”
5. The final step consists in employing a sign to represent a sound. It
is a more refined analysis of a word, and this gives simple phonetic
elements, few in number, but which can be indefinitely combined.
The ancient Egyptians curiously just stopped short of the final stage;
they developed alphabetical signs more than four thousand years B.C.,
but failed to make independent use of them. Their innate conservatism
appeared to paralyse further growth; truly the gods have not given all
the gifts to any one man, for they (like Hannibal) did not know how
to make use of their victory. When a word was alphabetically written
a phonogram was added to explain it, and an ideogram (or pictograph)
was added to explain the phonogram. The word as finally written was an
accretion of various stages in its own evolution.
Those who would like to trace the processes by which one alphabet has
been developed must be referred to Dr. Taylor’s great work, from which
I have abstracted so much.
For the sake of convenience Egyptian scribes developed a hieratic
writing from the hieroglyphics. Strangely enough this was twice
accomplished, the early Hieratic was truly cursive and much bolder than
the later and more delicate, though less modified Hieratic. The former
was invented before the period of the Hyskos or Shepherd Kings, and the
latter, or Theban Hieratic, arose in the succeeding Ramesidan dynasty.
The Semites, who dwelt in the Delta of Lower Egypt during the five or
six centuries of the Hyskos dynasty, seized on the alphabetic symbols
of the cursive Hieratic, which was the secular writings as opposed
to the sacred hieroglyphs. Their language and mode of thought being
different from that of the Egyptian scribe, and having no sacred
traditions to hamper them, they were able to break away from the
trammels of antiquity. They were wise enough to drop the useless lumber
of the phonogram and ideogram, and so they dissected out, as it were,
the alphabet from the cursive Hieratic. This was done in order to
have a ready and simple method for recording business transactions.
Along with their wares the Phœnicians distributed along the shores
of the Mediterranean this far more valuable acquisition. The gift
of the knowledge of letters with its vast potentialities more than
counterbalanced the sharp practices of these keen traders.
It was reserved for yet another people, the Greeks, to perfect the
alphabet they had learnt from the Phœnicians to an extent which the
Semites were unable to accomplish, and this improvement in notation
enabled them to register thoughts more ennobling than the records of
commerce. It is scarcely conceivable that Greece could have risen
to her intellectual pre-eminence if she had been shackled with
phonographic writing. Evolution in notation is necessary for the
evolution of mental processes.
The evolution of the art of writing clearly shows that it was expedient
for the utilitarian to destroy the æsthetic, for it must be admitted
that the hieroglyphics of Ancient Egypt were the most decorative of
all known writing symbols. Professor Flinders Petrie, in a lecture
delivered at the Royal Institute, in May 1894, stated that “the
Egyptian treatment of everything was essentially decorative; the
love of form and drawing was in Egypt a greater force than amongst
any other ancient people. Babylon and China, from want of sufficient
artistic taste, allowed their pictorial writing to sink into a mere
string of debased and conventional forms; the Egyptians, on the
contrary, preserve the purely pictorial and artistic character of
their hieroglyphs to the end. The hieroglyphs were a decoration in
themselves; their very position in the sentence was subordinated
to the decorative effect; the Egyptian could not be guilty of the
barbarism seen on some of the Assyrian sculpture, where inscriptions
were scrawled right across the work without regard to design. So far
was this idea carried that many words or ideas were represented by
two distinct characters, one wide and the other narrow and deep, so
that the harmony of the design should not be broken by an unsuitable
element. The result was that the Egyptians were rewarded by having the
most beautiful writing in the world.”[122] The less the picture became
like what it was intended to represent the more useful it became as a
means for conveying thought. But in the new-found method of expression
æsthetics has vastly gained, and from our present point of view we may
regard as the final term of the series, vivid written descriptions of
scenes and events or word-pictures.
[122] Newspaper Report.