Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume I.djvu/374

350 ALPHABET the Latin alphabet with changed value are two, namely, C, F ; 5, of Latin invention is a single letter, G ; 6, imported from Greek into Latin in differentiated form and with later Greek value is one, Y ; 7, varying graphic forms of Latin letters, raised in modern times to inde- pendent value, are two, J, V ; 8, recent addi- tion, made by doubling an old sign, is one letter, W: If we had shown, in the handling of the system of signs received from abroad, the same freedom and independence as the Greeks and Komans, we should have an alphabet of at least 32 letters, instead of 26 ; for we require separate representatives for the vowel sound in cat and care, for that in what and all, and for that in tut and burn; and for the sibilants in shun and azure, the initial spirants of thin and this, and the nasal in singing ; while thecA sound in church is also, though strictly of com- pound nature, well entitled to a separate char- acter: the C, Q, and X, on the other hand, having no value which should render their retention necessary. The ground of the ar- rangement of our alphabet is in the main infer- rible from the account of its history given above, being, when once started from the Phoenician basis, strictly a historical one: A to F follow the Phoenician order ; G was put by the Ro- mans in the place of the consciously omitted Z ; H and I, again, have their Phoenician posi- tions ; J follows the letter of which it is, as it were, the recently separated shadow ; K to T, again, are in their Phoenician places ; U comes next, as being the first addition made by the Greeks, and it is succeeded by V and W, as I by J ; X is another Greek addition, adopted into the earliest Roman alphabet ; Y and Z are the later additions made to the Latin from the Greek. When, however, we come to in- quire into the reason for the Phoenician order its3lf, we are baffled, and unable to arrive at any satisfactory results; the arrangement seems to be almost altogether fortuitous. Prob- ably it is not by accident that the three sonant mutes, b, g, d, come together, next after the aleph ; nor that the three liquids, I, m, n, are also found side by side later ; but all attempts at explanation beyond this are little better than mere guesses, and involve theories re- specting the origin of the alphabet which reach far beyond our actual knowledge. For we really are wholly in the dark as to the antecedents of the old Semitic mode of writing ; neither tra- dition and history, nor the traced relation of its characters to those of other modes of writing, nor their own shapes and names, afford ground for anything more than unrestrained conjecture. The names of the characters are each the name of some sensible and depictable object, which has for its initial the letter named: thus, aleph, ox; leth, house; gimel, camel; daleth, door ; and so on. Considering that many Egyptian phonetic hieroglyphs are well known to have gained the office of representing cer- tain sounds because those sounds were the in- itials of the objects depicted (thus, the eagle, ahom, becoming a sign for a; the lion, labo, for I), the supposition has seemed a highly plausible one that the Phoenician letters also were originally rude pictures of the objects in- dicated by their names. And this supposition receives a degree of confirmation from a certain resemblance traceable in a few cases between the letter and the object : thus, the sign for aleph is not unlike the front of an ox's head ; mem, water, is like one of the common con- ventional signs of water, a waving or indented surface; and ain, eye (our 0), is a tolerable eye in outline. Yet the evidence of such a kind is too scanty to be much relied on, and it is quite as plausible a theory that names should have been chosen on acrophonic grounds for a set of signs otherwise originated ; and that a few among them should happen to be, or should have been, chosen because they were sug- gestive of an object resembling the sign itself. The Phoenician alphabet, as completed in system and worked over in shape by the Greeks and Romans, has become the most convenient and useful of all the modes of writing invented by men ; and it has gone with European civ- ilization over a great part of the globe. Efforts are making to introduce it among various eastern nations in substitution for their own more cumbrous and incomplete alphabets ; but with little success hitherto, since national pre- possession clings with especial tenacity to an institution so inwoven by tradition and custom with a nation's feeling as is its national mode of writing. Efforts, again, have been made to expand this alphabet, by diacritical marks and added signs, into a system capable of accurately representing all the various sounds (some scores in number) which are made by human organs in the utterance of language ; the most con- spicuous of these efforts is that of Prof. Lepsius of Berlin (" Standard Alphabet," &c., 2d edi- tion, London and Berlin, 1863). Others, yet again, have devised alphabets founded on an analysis of the physical processes of production of each sound, and representing those processes by suggestive signs, so as to make each letter by its shape define the precise mode of its own utterance : for example, Dr. Brftcke of Vienna ("Proceedings of the Vienna Academy," vol. xli., 1863), and Mr. A. M. Bell of London ("Visible Speech," &c., London, 1867). Into an account of these attempts we cannot here enter. Nor can we speak in detail of the other alphabets invented and in use among other parts of the human race. Respecting some of them, the articles on special languages, and that on WHITING, will give information. In order to make clearer the relations of the Greek and Latin to the Phoenician or ancient Semitic alphabet, as they have been described above, the following comparative table is given. , The first or left-hand column presents the Phoenician letters : their forms (which vary more or less considerably in records of differ- ent age and locality) are in part those of the great Sidonian monument of King Eshmunezer