—provided themselves with alphabets derived from the Greek. All these excepting the last have passed away, along with the nationalities and languages to which they belonged; but the Latin alphabet has become the common property of nearly all the enlightened nations of modern times whose civilization is derived from that of Greece and Rome; while, under European influence, its use has also extended and is extending among the races of inferior endowments and culture, even crowding out, to some extent, their indigenous and less convenient modes of writing.
Our examination of the history of writing might here properly enough be closed; yet the particular interest which we take in our own alphabet will justify us in delaying a little, to note the principal steps of the process by which it has been derived from the Phenician—so far, at least, as it is possible to do this without graphic illustration. We shall also thus see more clearly how a borrowed system is wont to be modified and expanded, in passing from the service of one language into that of another. There is never a precise accordance between the phonetic systems, the spoken alphabets, of any two languages, so that a written alphabet which suits the one can be immediately applied to the other's uses; and hence the history of every scheme of characters which has won a wide currency, among various nations, presents a succession of adaptations, more or less wisely and skilfully made.
The chief change wrought upon the Phenician alphabet by the Greeks consisted, as has been already pointed out, in the provision of signs for the vowels. The Semitic tongues, as compared with the Greek, were characterized by an excess of guttural and sibilant sounds: the superfluous signs representing these, then, were put to divers new uses in Greece; our A, E, and O were to the Phenicians designations of certain guttural breathings, having the value of consonants; the semivowel y being wanting in Greek, its sign was greatly altered and simplified to form our I; the sign for w was retained by the early Greeks as the digamma (though abandoned later); for u, they invented a wholly new character, V or Y (which are by origin only varying graphic forms of the same letter).
