Dear Comrade:
We have been studying this course in Plain English for some weeks now
and I trust that you have been enjoying as well as benefiting by the
study of our wonderful and expressive language. Did you ever stop to
think what a wonderful step it was in evolution when man first began to
use the spoken word? And yet it was a still more wonderful step in
advance when he began to use the written word for our highest evolution,
and development would have been impossible without the help of written
speech. An illiterate man may be a good workman and prosperous so far as
the material things of life and his immediate contact with his fellow
men are concerned, but we have only to think for a moment of what this
world would be if we had no written language, to understand what a
mighty power it has been in evolution.
Suppose we had no way by which we could communicate with our friends at
a distance. Suppose there were no written words by which we could set
down the countless dealings between man and man. What a hopeless tangle
this social life of ours would soon become! Suppose also that we had no
knowledge of the past, no knowledge of the discoveries and inventions of
past generations except that which could be handed down to us through
oral speech. All our knowledge of history, of the deeds and development
of the past, all the observations by which science has uncovered to us
the mysteries of nature would be largely lost to us. It was the
invention of writing alone which made possible man's growth from
barbarism to civilization, and it is more true than we oftentimes
realize, that it is "only a wall of books that separates the civilized
man of to-day from the savage of yesterday." And yet I wonder if we have
ever stopped to think how this art of writing developed. Knowledge of
the alphabet and of the letters by which we form our words and hence are
able to express our ideas, has become such a common-place thing to us
that we have forgotten what a wonder it is and how it has slowly grown
and developed through the centuries. Yet there are races to-day that
have no written language such as we know and to whom our written
language seems truly a miracle.
The story is told of an Indian who was sent from one colony to another
with four loaves of bread accompanied by a letter stating their number.
The Indian ate one of the loaves and of course, was found out. The next
time when he was sent upon a similar errand he repeated the theft but he
took the precaution to hide the letter under a stone while he was eating
the bread so that it might not see him!
But it is only the things that we do not understand which we invest with
mystery and as we study the story of the alphabet in this series of
letters we find that it has been a natural development accomplished by
the growing powers of man. In succeeding letters we will trace this most
interesting story of the alphabet.
Yours for Education,