Do you know your A B C’s? Each Letter Character Has a
History and a Reason for Its Present Form. Have you Ever
Questioned the Origin and Significance of the Alphabet?
Our transition from barbarism to civilization can be attributed to the
alphabet. Those great prehistoric discoveries and inventions such as the
making of a fire, the use of tools, the wheel and the axle, and even our
modern marvelous applications of steam and electricity pale into
insignificance when compared with the power of the alphabet. Simple as
it now appears after the accustomed use of ages, it can be accounted not
only the most difficult, but also the most fruitful of all the
achievements of the human intellect.
Man lived by “bread alone” and without the alphabet untold ages, and
with a practical alphabetic system not more than 3,000 years. So
important and wonderful was this step deemed by those who lived nearer
the time of its inception—in the time before the wonder of its
extraordinary powers had been blunted by long possession and common
use—that its invention, as well as that of writing, was invariably
attributed to divine origin.
Modern investigation always seeks sources other than mythological ones,
and thus the science of ancient handwriting, paleography, came into
existence. In the last hundred and twenty-five years the writing of the
ancient Egyptians, which was a “sealed book” for nearly twenty
centuries, has been deciphered through the efforts of Champollion and
Young; the mysterious cuneiform characters of ancient Assyria and
Babylon have been interpreted by Grotofend and Rawlinson, and the
“missing link” to connect our present alphabetic system to these ancient
ones is being partly completed by Sir Arthur Evans, who is compiling and
analyzing Cretan characters and pre-Phoenician writing. The story,
however, will probably never be told in its entirety.
* * * * *
The forms of our letters, with the exception of G, J, U, W, reached
their full development two thousand years ago. The Roman letter was the
parent of all the styles notwithstanding the diversity that has appeared
in Europe since the beginning of the Christian era. With a little
imagination it is not difficult to note the resemblance between similar
letters of the old Roman capitals and those following that have been
designated as script, italic, Old English or black letter, versal,
uncial, and an endless list of alphabet families. The desire for speed,
and the influence of the tool, pen, reed, chisel, brush, were the
determining factors in the change of form. Curiously enough instead of
being archaic, the Roman alphabet, which is now 2,000 years old, is
still the most useful because of its legibility, and also the most
beautiful.
We derived twenty-three of our letters from the Romans. They had taken
probably eighteen of these from the Greeks about the fourth century B.
C. and afterwards borrowed elsewhere or invented seven more. Instead of
giving them names as the Greeks did, they simply called them by the
sounds for which they stood: A (ah), B (bay). They introduced the curve
wherever possible, whereas the early Greek letters were all angular—what
an interesting analogy is evident in the architecture of those two
peoples, the temple pediment and angularity of the Greeks as contrasted
with the dome and arch of the Romans.
The Greeks, in their contact with those great traders and “Yankees of
ancient time,” the Phoenicians, saw the value of their alphabetic
writing and inaugurated its use about the time of the first Olympiad,
776 B. C. Three or four centuries before they gave it to the Romans the
ancient Greeks found use for fifteen of the Phoenician letters and then
conceived enough to round out an alphabet of twenty-four characters.The
changes that took place in the shape of their letters can be attributed
to their sense of order; the letters are balanced better and the parts
better related.
* * * * *
The Greeks were interested in the sound value only, not in the picture
value of the symbol, and, therefore, they probably did not notice that
A, for instance, had ever been a picture of the head of an ox and that
it was now drawn upside down; and that the Phoenician name “Alpeh” meant
ox and that they mispronounced the sound in calling it “Alpha.”
The Romans borrowed from the Greeks and the Greeks had borrowed from the
Phoenicians, but where did the Phoenicians obtain their letters? Did
they invent them? To what extent were these letters influenced by
earlier systems of writings as those employed by the Cretan, Assyrian
and Egyptian civilizations? These are questions that probably will never
be answered satisfactorily. Many arguments and theories are advanced. We
can, however, trace back with certainty a number of our letters to the
Phoenician alphabet of 1000 B. C. Beyond this all is, at present, a
matter of conjecture.
The Phoenician alphabet consisted of twenty-two pictures of familiar
objects. These pictures were rudely and simply made, for writers and
readers soon recognized the fundamental characteristics and all
unnecessary details were eliminated. The great advance that can be
credited to them is that they realized that a small number of
sound-expressing characters, if well selected, are sufficient to express
any word. Other races at this period had phonetic systems but they
consisted of numerous symbols and cumbersome appendages of
non-alphabetic characters—“eye pictures” side by side with “ear
pictures.” No doubt earlier Phoenician writing passed through the stages
of development traceable in so many countries:
1. The pictures or characters suggesting the thing
or incident (picture writing).
2. The pictures or characters symbolizing the thing
or idea (ideographic or symbolic writing).
3. The pictures or characters representing the sound
of the thing or idea (phonograms).
4. The sign suggesting the various sounds of
the language (alphabetic system).
To free this last stage from the others was the great Phoenician
contribution.
A
Why is A the first letter? It represents one of the commonest vowel
sounds in ancient languages. Naturally the Phoenician alphabet makers
selected a familiar object in the name of which this particular vowel
sound was emphasized. Since food is of primal importance, it is not
surprising to find that he chose the ox—“Alef” (ahˊlef), or rather the
head of the ox, for the characteristics of animals are chiefly embodied
in the head. Not only was the ox important as food but also as a beast
of burden, for the ox had been harnessed to the plow centuries before
the horse was domesticated. Thus one of the earliest and most important
of man’s friends among the brute creatures was honored.
In making this letter repeatedly and rapidly they became careless and
instead of crossing the letter V they tried to make it with one
continuous scratching, hence when the Greeks became acquainted with it
three to five centuries after its invention, the picture had
deteriorated almost beyond recognition. They introduced balance and the
V was inverted, and the cross-bar was retained between the lines.
Unknowingly they were drawing the ox head upside down; and it remains so
with us to this day. The Greeks called the first letter alpha, the
Romans called it A (ah) and we call it A (ay), a sound it never
possessed in Latin.
B
The second letter of the alphabet represents a crude house, roughly
outlined. After food, shelter is an important consideration and this
fact was expressed by the early alphabet maker. The Greeks again were
ignorant of the picture and careless or indifferent as to the exact name
of the character, and thus two triangles instead of the square
supporting a triangle were made and the name changed from “beth” to
“beta” (baˊta). Combine the Greek names for the first two letters and we
have (alpha-beta) “alphabet.” The Romans shortened the name “beta,”
calling it B (bay) and introduced the curved loops. The original name is
familiar to us through names found in the Scriptures: Bethel (house of
God) and Bethlehem (house of bread).