Wonders of the Alphabet.
By Henry Eckford.
Third Paper.
Perhaps you have never given a thought to the fact that, because vou were born into a nation using an alphabet that came down from the Phœnicians, you are saved a world of trouble. But consider the Chinese. If a Chinese boy and an American boy begin to learn their letters at the same time, each studying his own writing, then by the time the American 1s ten years old he has advanced as far in the use of letters as the Chinese boy will have advanced in the use of his when he is twenty years old. That is the same as saying that Chinese writing is three or four times as hard to learn as English. Think of spending the years between ten and twenty in learning to read! On the other hand, the long apprenticeship of Chinese and Japanese boys to their letters does them good in one way. They paint their letters with a brush on soft paper. By this means they learn very early to be skillful with the brush, which is one reason why Chinese and Japanese artists are so very dexterous with their brushes,
All writing, let it be remembered, must have begun with pictures. It is largely Chinese writing which has explained how all sorts of letters were gradually changed from pictures to an alphabet, in which hardly a single letter tells from what picture it started, The Japanese tongue is quite different from the Chinese. But the use by the Japanese of signs employed ages before by the Chinese explains another step in the progress of language, The writing of the Mexican Indians also helps us to understand the growth of alphabets. When, ages ago. the Chinese began to write, they drew little pictures of the things they wished to represent, as did the Egyptians before them in their picture-writing; and from picture-writing they made some advance in the direction of sound-writing, or rebuses, Then the little rebus-pictures were so much altered that it became very difficult to see what they once meant.
Now Chinese is a queer language. All its words are only one syllable long. But the sounds in the Chinese language are not very many, some four hundred and sixty-five at most, and their written language contains about eighty thousand pictures, each picture representing a thing or idea. And these pictures must be committed to memory. This is hard work, and not even the wisest Chinese professor can learn them all. But now comes a difficulty.
For, of course, where there are so many words and so few sounds, many different words have to be called by the same sound, How then are they to tell, when several different things have exactly the same name which of them is meant?
We have such words, For instance. there is Bill, the name of a boy; and bill, the beak of a bird; there is bill, an old weapon, and bill, a piece of money: there is bill, an article over which legislatures debate, and bill, a claim tor payment of money; besides bills of exchange, bills of lading, and so forth. But Chinese is full of such words of a single syllable, yer, for instance, which, like bill, means many very different things. So they chose a number of little pictures, and agreed that these should be used as “keys,” The Chinese “keys”
Rebus-Pictures from the Old Chinese, showing the beginnings of Picture-Writing.
