(a)Aramean, so called from "Aram," the hilly district of Mesopotamia, became, fromthe seventh centuryb.c., the commercial script of Asia, Aram lying in the line of trade between Egypt and Babylonia. Later on that script was used for official purposes at the Babylonian court, and "ultimately broke up into a number of national alphabets, for which, owing to religious causes, a separate existence became possible. The later alphabets—Parsi, Hebrew, Syriac, Mongolian, and Arabic—were at first local varieties of the Aramean. Owing to accidental circumstances they became the sacred scripts of the five great faiths of Asia—Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Northern Buddhism, and Islam. Hence the descendants of the Aramean alphabet occupy a space on the map second only to that filled by the Latin alphabet itself." (Taylor, i. 249.) They are, as indicated in the table: (1) theHebrew, in whose modern square characters copies of the Scriptures in that language are printed, and the rolls of the Law inscribed; (2) theSyriac, once an important script of Christian literature, but now only in use among some obscure sects; (3) theMongolian, which has a curious history, narrated at length in Canon Taylor's volumes (i. pp. 297-312). It is derived from the Syriac, which was carried by Nestorian missionaries throughout Asia. Condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431a.d.for certain heresies concerning the dual nature of Christ, these Nestorians fled to Persia, and thence travelling eastward, preached their gospel with such success that the alphabet in which it was written became the dominant script until its supersession by Arabic on the spreadof Mohammedanism. (4) The history ofArabic, which is more nearly allied to Syriac than to any other member of the Aramean group, exhibits the aggressive spirit of the Prophet, whose scriptures are transcribed in its beautiful flowing characters. It has exterminated its fellow-Semitic scripts, "expelled the Greek alphabet from Asia Minor, Thrace, Syria, and Egypt, and the Latin alphabet from Northern Africa, and is now used over regions inhabited by more than one hundred millions of the human race." The transactions of the East are recorded in the alphabet of the Koran, so that it would seem, in the world's history, that if "trade follows the flag," the alphabet follows religion.
The so-called "Arabic" numerals are probably of Indian origin, having been brought by Arab traders from the East and introduced by them into Spain in the Middle Ages, whence they spread over Europe, coming into use in England perhaps about the eleventh century. But whether India invented them, or borrowed them from Greek or other traders from the West, is unknown. Counting with the fingers, the most primitive mode of reckoning, and recording by strokes, a method still in vogue, have their limits, and hence (to say nothing of the use of pebbles and beans, and of the abacus) the invention of written signs for the higher numbers; or the adoption of the letters of the alphabet in their order as number-signs, the numerical value increasing with eachsuccessive letter; or the use of the initial letter of the word itself for the number. Examples of special symbols for tens, hundreds, and so forth are supplied by Egyptian and Assyrian records, as shown in the following figures:—
EGYPTIAN NUMERATIONASSYRIAN NUMERATION
EGYPTIAN NUMERATION
ASSYRIAN NUMERATION
We have examples of the use of letters in their "abecedarian" or acrostic order in the sections of the one hundred and nineteenth and one hundred and forty-fifth Psalms, which bear the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and in the books of theIliad, which bear the letters of the Greek alphabet. That alphabet also supplies illustration of the acrologic method, ase.g.Π = Πέντε, for 5;Δ = Δέκα, for 10;H(the old sign for the rough breathing inἙκατον), for 100;X = Ξίλιοι, for 1000;ΠwithΛ (= 5 x 10)inscribed in it standing for 50. A more ingenious method was adopted by both Greeks and Hebrews in the division of the alphabet into three groups: the first to represent units; the second, tens; and the third, hundreds. The use of "Arabic" numerals, besides encountering opposition at the start, was limiteduntil the fifteenth century to the paging of books and mathematical formulæ, but their convenience as compared with the cumbrous Roman figures won them general adoption. Their stages of modification were pictorially suggested by Canon Taylor in a communication to theAcademy28th January 1882, from which the table onp. 212is borrowed, but the question of origin remains unsettled.
An age to which, more than to its predecessors, with their more sedate lives, "time is money," may appreciate what service they wrought who invented the few numerals, the relative places of which serve the purpose of recording the commerce of the world. But perhaps the greater admiration is due to the genius which devised the nought or cipher (Arab.sifr, "empty"), without which the labour of calculation and recording would have taxed energy beyond endurance.
The (5)Pehlevi, (6)Armenian, and (7)Georgianalphabets are derived from the Aramean group through the Persian or Iranian. The Pehlevi has abiding interest as the script of the sacred books of the Zend or Parsi religion; but the Armenian and Georgian, with the addition of three or four Greek letters, are bereft of significance except as the surviving representatives of the ancient Persian. The Indo-Bactrian alphabet should have reference here as of Iranian descent, and especially because it is the script of the famous edicts of Asoka, the first royal Buddhist convert, inscribed on a rock near Peshawar.
(b)The Sabæan(from "Sheba") or Himyaritic (from Himyar, the eponymous hero of the Himyarites) group is classed among South Semiticalphabets. The early alphabet of Abyssinia, called Ethiopic or Amharic, is derived from it, and, wherein lies its main importance, also the alphabets of India, the number of which, comprising more than half of the alphabets now in use, would, in detailed treatment, "demand a space wholly disproportionate to any interest which they might possess save to an extremely limited band of specialists." That is Canon Taylor's excuse for passing them over with brevity, and those who care to pursue a subject yielding to few in dryness will find it summarised in the tenth chapter of his work. For the present purpose, the list of alphabets set down in the table will suffice.
(c)The Hellenic.—It was a happy chance that, in the westward course of the Phœnician alphabet, the Greeks were the first to receive it. For while the various scripts of Asia and the Malayan Archipelago, which are derived from that alphabet, have retained, in the main, its consonantal character, leaving the vowels to be only partially indicated, the Greeks, with master-touch, shaped it to relative perfection in adding separate letters to represent the vowels, so that there might be a visible sign for every audible sound of the human voice. Besides this, they put some of the superfluous gutturals and sibilants to new uses, simplified other characters, and ultimately transposed the Semitic mode of writing from right to left by writing from left to right. These, and other changes both in the Greek and its derived alphabets, were made slowly and almost imperceptibly, "descentwith modification," to apply the Darwinian phrase concerning plants and animals to the scripts of the world, being as much a feature in their history as in that of organisms generally. To complete the parallel, when a certain stage of adaptation is reached, there is, ase.g.in the case of our own alphabet, mainly through the invention of printing, arrest of development. Nature may aim at perfection, but is content with adjustment, and the works of man abide only as they are, in Stoic maxim, "according to nature."
The alphabets derived from the Hellenic are (1)Greek, (2)Russian, (3)Coptic, (4)Latin.
(1)Greek.—To the ancient Greek Hellas meant no defined country, but simply the abode of the Hellenes, whether in Smyrna, Syracuse, Athens, or wherever else they might be found. The mountainous character of Greece explains its division into a crowd of petty states, many of which were no bigger than a modern township. This accorded with Aristotle's view that the area of the state should not be wider than an orator's voice would carry. The physical separation of the peoples explains that political disunion which was the curse of the country from first to last, and accounts for the forty local alphabets which made for discord. But the federation at the time of the Persian invasion, when the victories of Marathon and Salamis fostered conceptions of a common fatherland, was followed by the rise of Athens, and her intellectual supremacy determined that of one of thealphabets. These had settled into two leading groups, the Ionian (in which the Corinthian may be included) and the Chalcidian. The Ionian, which was developed in the famous colony of that name, deviated more from the Phœnician type than the Chalcidian. It was adopted by Athens 483b.c., and became the classic alphabet of Greece. From it there sprang the Slavonic, Coptic, and other alphabets, while the Chalcidian gave birth to the alphabets of Western Europe.
(2)Russian.—A quaint and probably trustworthy tradition tells how the Greek alphabet was imported into Russia. "Formerly," says John, Exarch of Bulgaria, who wrote in the ninth century, "the Slavonians had no books, but they read and made divinations by means of pictures and figures cut on wood, being pagans. After they had received baptism they were compelled, without any proper rules, to write their Slavonic tongue by means of Greek and Latin letters. But how could they write well in Greek letters such words as Bog, Zhivot, Zelo, or Tserkov, and others like these? And so many years passed by. But then God, loving the human race, had pity on the Slavonians, and sent them St. Constantine, the Philosopher, called Cyril, a just and true man, who made for them an alphabet of thirty-eight letters, of which some were after the Greek style, and some after the Slavonic language." The variety of sounds in Slavonic involved the addition of ten characters to Cyril's alphabet, and although that number was afterwards reduced, the Russian remains the most cumbersome and ungainly of alphabets.
(3)Coptic, or, more correctly, the Coptic script of Egypt under the Romans. Notwithstanding the advent of Cæsar Augustus as Prefect of Egypt, Greek influence prevailed, and the native Christians, in transcribing the Coptic version of the Bible, used the Greek alphabet, borrowing some half-dozen of the ancient Egyptian demotic signs to express sounds unrepresented by the Greek. But, as throughout Mohammedan countries, Arabic has supplanted Coptic, which is now used only for liturgical purposes, "perhaps little if at all understood by the priests who have to use it in the services of the Church."
(4)Latin.—This is, far and away, the most important of all alphabets. As stated above, it is derived from the Chalcidian type of the Hellenic, so called because in use at Chalcis, in Eubœa, an island of the Ægean, whence migrated one of the several Greek colonies planted in Southern Italy. As the oldest Italic scripts—copying the older method of the Greek—read from right to left, and as the first thing aimed at by the colonists would be the use of common sound-signs and numerals, there is good warrant for fixing the date of the introduction of the Greek alphabet into Italy at about the eighth century before Christ. The various derived scripts—Umbrian, Oscan, Etruscan, and others—have all, the Latin alone excepted, passed away. The ultimate dominance of the Latins brought about the abolition of everyother alphabet than their own, which, becoming the alphabet of the Roman Empire, and then of Christendom, secured an everlasting supremacy. It was the vehicle of Greek and Roman culture to Western Europe; it is the vehicle of all the culture of the progressive races of the world. Although essentially identical with the Greek, it took its own line, and that, compared with the Slavonic, a simple one. The earliest Indo-European or "Aryan" language contained, so far as can be discovered, twelve consonants and three vowels (i,a,u), and to these last the Latin addedeando. It at first rejected the Greek K, and used C for the sounds of bothkandg, but later on added a bar to the lower end of C, converting it into G. Similarly, R is but a variation of P, by the addition of a stroke below the crook. And while the later Greek rejected Q, the Latin retained it. But not to multiply examples, citations of which are confusing in the absence of explanations of the causes necessitating changes of form, explanations too technical for admission here (see for examples Taylor, ii. 140), it may suffice to give a few specimens of variations between the older and newer Latin and Greek forms.
FINAL LATIN AND GREEK FORMS COMPARED WITH THEIRPROTOTYPES IN THE OLDER ALPHABETS
FINAL LATIN AND GREEK FORMS COMPARED WITH THEIRPROTOTYPES IN THE OLDER ALPHABETS
In the early empire the Romans used two sorts of characters, Capital and Cursive. The Capitals were square-shaped or rustic,i.e.slightly ornamented. They were used for inscriptions and other writing demanding prominence, as we use capitals nowadays, borrowing the old Roman forms. The Cursive or running characters are the originals of our small types, and were used for correspondence and other purposes where rapid writing was an object, abbreviations, which are the forerunners of our modern "shorthand," being sometimes employed. Out of this cursive hand there arose a variety of hand-writings, the most important among these being the Irish "semi-uncial." The appearance of this script in that island is one of the problems of graphiology. "No Irish hand is known out of which it could have arisen. And yet in the sixth centuryIreland suddenly becomes the chief school of Western calligraphy, and the so-called Irish uncial blazes forth in full splendour as the most magnificent of all mediæval scripts. Only one conclusion seems possible. Some time in the fifth century a fully-formed, book-hand must have been introduced by St. Patrick (432-458a.d.), doubtless from Gaul, where he received his consecration. And this must have been cultivated as a calligraphic script in the Irish monasteries, which at this time enjoyed comparative immunity from the ravages of the Teutonic invaders, who, in the fifth century, desolated Italy, Gaul, and Spain." (Taylor, ii. 173.) Irish monks introduced it into Northumbria, and in course of time there was derived from it the "Caroline minuscule," as it is called, because it was introduced in the reign of Charlemagne in the famous school at Tours founded by Alcuin of York, a celebrated scholar of the eighth century, and friend of the Emperor. As a clear hand, compressible into a small space, it grew rapidly in favour till the end of the twelfth century, when a period of decadence, of which the ugly "Black Letter" was the result, set in and held sway in Western Europe for a generation after the discovery of printing with movable types. The Black-letter characters were imitations of the coarse thick characters of the monkish manuscripts, and it was not till the early part of the sixteenth century that they were displaced in England by the Roman letters, whose basis is the Caroline minuscule (see p.37).Here, however, we are on the threshold of the "chapel," and must retrace our steps for brief survey of the few changes introduced into the Latin alphabet in adapting it to the requirements of the English language. These are shown in the admirable table borrowed from Canon Taylor. (History of the Alphabet, i. 72.) The order of the letters (an unexplained problem in the history of the alphabet) approximates to that of the Phœnicians, and their names are based on the same principle as that of the Latin. Running our eye down the table we note that our alphabet provides for certain phonetic variations by turning the Latin I into I and J, and VV or UV into double U = W. The Anglo-Saxon, which appears to be partly Roman and partly Irish in origin, had borrowed two useful characters from the Runic, Þ = w, namedwen, and Þ = th, namedthorn, which for a time formed part of the English alphabet. Thethornhas been revived of late, as a bastard archaic, in the printing oftheasye, with consequent mispronunciation of that word by those who see it thus changed. Both Y and Z were late importations from the Greek into the Latin, being used only in Greek loan-words to denote sounds peculiar to the Greek; hence, as the most recent arrivals, their appearance at the end of the alphabet. Some of our letters are of little use; K makes C superfluous, and Q and X are of no more service to us than they were to the Romans. So that, for practical purposes, we have only twenty-three letters wherewith to indicate at leastthirty-two sounds. Thus our alphabet, like our spelling (which is ever at war with our pronunciation, to the bewilderment of school children and foreigners), is what it is from the lack of any consistent rule. Nevertheless, so workable a set of signs has secured a footing which, made firmer by the art of printing, is not likely to be disturbed by any processes of phonetic change which mark the course of speech. To that art of printing is also due those modifications in handwriting which distinguish the penmanship of past and present times. As has been seen, while Germany remained in fetters to the eye-distracting Black letter, we freed ourselves by adoption of the clear Roman type; hence the disappearance, save in legal documents and a few show art-books, of the cramped hand which prevailed down to the sixteenth century. So the handwriting of to-day (good, bad, and indifferent, as the personal equation of each one of us shapes it), which we learned at school through the stages of "pot-hooks and hangers" to the grandest flourishes of copy-book "maxims," is derived from the same source as the printed alphabet.
GENEALOGY OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
GENEALOGY OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
RUNES AND OGAMS
The Runic alphabet originated among the Scandinavians, who probably adapted it from some other script, since no traces of any pictographic characters whence it may have been derived have been found. Some scholars hold that it is derived from the "Phœnician" alphabet; others say that it comes from the Latin. Canon Taylor has a definite theory that it is a degraded form of the Greek alphabet; for in the sixth centuryb.c.the Goths swarmed in the region south of the Baltic and east of the Vistula, and in their trading relations with Greek colonists north of the Black Sea may readily have obtained a knowledge of the Greek alphabet. The question, however, of origin remains, and is likely to remain, unsettled.
The sharp, angular form of the runes proves that they were incised on wood, stone, or some such rigid material, and these characters persist in the few manuscripts which have been found. The primitive Gothic alphabet is named, on the acrologic principle, "futhorc," after the first six letters,f,u,th,o,r,c. It was divided intothree parts or "aetts," named after the first letter of each "aett" or family—"Frey's aett," "Hagl's aett," and "Tyr's aett"—as shown in the following illustration from an article on Runes by Miss Gertrude Rawlings (Knowledge, 1st October, 1896).
RUNE ALPHABET
RUNE ALPHABET
The Scandinavian, Anglian, and Manx runes are local variants of this oldest form. Runic inscriptions—monumental and sepulchral—have a wide, although exclusive, range. They are found in the valley of the Danube, but not in Germany; in America, but not in Ireland; in the Isle of Man, but not in Wales—thus evidencing their restriction within Scandinavian lines of migration. The oldest was found at Sandwich, in Kent; but an especially interesting example is the well-known Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire, on which is inscribed a poem, "The Dream of the Holy Rood," ascribed to Cædmon, the herdsman poet of the seventh century. The early voyage of the Vikings to Vineland, as they named America, has illustration in a Runic epitaph cut in a rock on the Potomac. "Here lies Syasi, the fair one of Western Iceland, the widow of Koldr, sister of Thorgr, by her father, aged twenty-five years. God be merciful to her." The old alphabet was displaced by the Latin on theconversion of the peoples of Northern Europe to Christianity, but not before Ulphilas, the Bishop of the Goths, had woven some of its characters into the compound script which was the vehicle of his memorable translation of the Gospels, the lovely manuscript of which, in gold and silver letters on purple vellum, is worth a visit to the University of Upsala to see.
The curious Ogam alphabet, which may date from the fifth centurya.d., and the use of which did not extend outside the British Isles, is held by some scholars to be derived from the Runic, but its characters indicate that more probably it is a debased copy of the Roman. Ogam, according to Professor Rhys, the highest authority on the subject, probably means "skilled use of words." The letters are formed by straight or slanting strokes drawn above, or beneath, or right through horizontal or perpendicular lines. The alphabet is divided into four aicmes or groups, each containing five letters: the first aicme,b,l,f,s,nbeing placed under the line (assuming this to be horizontal); the second aicme,h,t,d, C, Qn, above it; the third aicme,m,g,ng,f(?)r, diagonally through it; and the fourth aicme, comprising the vowelsa,o,u,e,i, intersecting it at right angles. Canon Taylor sees in the ogams an adaptation of the runes to the needs of the engraver, "notches cut with a knife on the edge of a squared staff being substituted for the ordinary runes." And he thinks that the derivation of the ogams fromrunes is shown in the fact that their names agree with the names of runes of corresponding value, and that they are found exclusively in regions where Scandinavian settlements were established. Professor Rhys regards them as "probably, the work of a grammarian acquainted with Roman writing, but too proud to adopt it." The larger number of Ogam inscriptions occur in Ireland; others are scattered over Scotland, Wales, and the south-west of England.
It may be thought that any survey of the history of the Alphabet, however free from overcrowding in detail, and however popular in treatment, would outline the story of the origin of, and changes in, each of the twenty-six letters which are, for the English-speaking races, the vehicle of communication and the depository of knowledge. But, probably, enough has been said to show that the information which would alone warrant such table of derivations is not yet forthcoming, and, perhaps, never will be. The most plausible theory that the wit of man, supported by a set of facts that seemed to hang well together, could devise, was formulated by M. de Rougé, and it has been seen that the epigraphic material found in the Ægean renders his apparently well-based and coherent theory no longer tenable.
Neither would there be advantage in cataloguing the two hundred and fifty alphabets which have come into being since prehistoric man scratched his rude pictographs on the faces of cliffs and on fragments of slate or bone. Some fifty of these alphabets have survived, and of these about half are found in India, but, whatever of historical value they may hold, their use is restricted and local. The rest are, in the main, variations of three scripts—Roman, Arabic, and Chinese—and an outlook on the world's course makes it no matter of doubt that it is with the Roman, as the vehicle of culture of the most advancing races of mankind, that there lies the maintenance of supremacy and the extension of its sway.
HORN BOOK,ONCE THE UNIVERSAL PRIMER(Now so excessively rare that a good example fetches £20 and upwards).
HORN BOOK,ONCE THE UNIVERSAL PRIMER
(Now so excessively rare that a good example fetches £20 and upwards).