St. Nicholas/Volume 13/Number 7/Wonders of the Alphabet
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.
were used like the Egyptian “determinative signs,” of which I told you. Each “key” meant that the sign or signs near which it stood belonged to some large general set of things, like things of the vegetable, mineral. or animal king-dom, forests, mines, or seas, air, or water, or of persons, like gods or men. It was like the game called Throwing Light, in which you guess the article by narrowing down the field until certain what it is.
But there Chinese writing stopped short, thousands of years ago. There it is to-day, There are now two hundred and fourteen of these “keys,” and, by intense application, Chinamen learn to use their method with surprising quickness and success.
The Japanese acted toward Chinese writing much as the Phœnicians did toward Egyptian writing. The Japanese, a very intelligent people, made what you have learned to know as a syllabary, out of signs taken from the Chinese symbols. It is called a syllabary. you remember, because each sign stood in their language for a syllable. They had to do this, because, while Chinese is all short syllables, Japanese is a language of much longer words even than ours. They cut down and simplified the Chinese signs, giving them names of their own. In this way they manage to write very swiftly, and, while not so clumsy as the Chinese fashion, the Japanese method is clumsier than is the use of an alphabet. In late years, a society has been started in Japan to do away altogether with their old-time writing, and adopt our alphabet.
Perhaps, by this time, you are beginning to see how very slowly alphabets haye grown, and how hard it has been for human beings to perfect them. Knowing this, will you not look now with more interest on written and printed words? When you see letters, will you not reflect what a history each one has, reaching far back into the remotest past, where at first all seems dark, and where, when light does come, the very number and variety of materials perplex the student of alphabets? Moreover, will you not feel ashamed of people who laugh or sneer at savage nations who have no sound-writing, no syllabary, no alphabet? It does not mean that in such races all men are stupid. As a rule it means simply that the race has not had a fair chance. it has been racked by wars. Or it has never come in contact peacefully with some nation that used a method of writing a trifle better than its own, so that the brighter minds could establish schools of learning. When one nation conquers another, the higher and cleverer minds among the conquered are often the first to be destroyed. The best of our Indians of North and South America seem to have been the first to fall in battle with the whites, or to have died off because of their cruelty. The reason why the others, who lived with or near the white settlers, did not readily borrow our way of writing in their turn, as we had borrowed from the Romans, the Romans from the Greeks and Phœnicians, and the latter from the Egyptians, seems to be that our system was too far advanced for them. But if the first white settlers in Central and South America had been kind and wise men, instead of coarse and greedy people, they could have found tribes and nations almost as advanced in their mode of writing as the Japanese, though nut the equals of the Japanese in architecture and the fine arts. These tribes could have learned our alphabet if care had been taken to instruct their superior men. It is certain that the Aztecs, or Mexican Indians, had advanced very far on the road to a true alphabet. When the cruel Spaniards arrived and upset their governments, destroyed their temples, massacred, enslaved and then shamefully neglected them, they had already reached the art of rebus-writing. The name of the Mexican King, Knife-Snake, or, Itz-Coatl was written in this way: Itzli means knives, and Coatl, snake. There. in Fig. 1, is the snake,
and on his back are knives made of flint. They even went farther. The same name, ltz-Coall, was also written as in Fig. 2. The flint-headed
arrow means Itz, the jar, called Comitl, stands for Co: and the branch, a picture of water in drops, stands for atl, water. And it has been asserted that certain neighbors of the Aztecs or Mexicans, known as the Maya Indians of Yucatan, who were ancient people of Central America, left ruins of cities covering square miles of forest and plain, and had reached nearly if not quite to the invention of an alphabet of vowels and consonants. But the latest authorities agree that such a Maya alphabet as the Spaniards reported may have been invented after the whites arrived. Specimens of Maya writing may be seen in Washington, at the Smithsonian Institute, on slabs and on paper casts taken from their idols or statues of kings and priests, It was not by the Maya system, but by one of rebuses, that the old missionaries wrote what few books they composed for their unhappy Indian congregations. Only lately a book composed in picture-writing throughout, was printed for the Mikmak Indians of Newfoundland.
In the next paper we will endeavor to trace the read by which our English alphabet came down from the Phœnicians, that ancient folk of the palm-tree and the Red Sea, whose alphabet you saw in the first paper of this series.
The illustrations of this article are reproduced, by permission, from a notable French work on ancient Hieroglyphics by Prof L. De Rosny, of Paris.