of whose existing name the sound to be represented forms simply the initial or the end.[1] This " acrological " process, by which the ideogram loses all of its correspondent sound but the opening or the close, has an intermediate stage before reaching the pure alphabet. Thus the Japanese, Mexicans, Assyrians, stripped it of its termination only, leaving the opening consonant and vowel, and forming syllabaries mixed with alphabetic sounds; while the Egyptian and Shemitic languages struck away all but the simple initial—what we should call the letter sound—and formed alphabets proper.^ Yet all alphabets have not been the
Sanscrit and Shemitic alphabets.
result of this natural evolution. To the Sanscrit, which is the product of an educated class, it has no application. Of the Shemitic, too, it has been strongly denied, yet by no means with equal force. Whether those mysterious Phoenician signs, mothers of the Hebrew and of so many other alphabets of the civilized world, are derived, as the most competent scholars now assert,^ from the Egyptian hieratic (or simplified picture-signs), or were invented by some one or in some way not now known,* they were at least acrologically " baptized." They have received the initial sounds of the names by which they are known ; and these names represented objects, of which the sign was either the altered image or the fancied resemblance.^ Renan goes further, and thinks that "the fact of the forms of these letters representing what their names signify is sign of a proceeding analogous to that of the hieroglyphic writings.
See Congris Iniernat. (ff Oriental, (1873), II. 106-115; also, De Rosny, Ecrit. Figur.
3 See Lenormant, Anc. Hist, of the East, II. 208; Maspero, p. 600; De Roug^, Acad. FranQ. 1874 ; Ebers, Egypten und die Bilcher Moses, pp. 146-151 ; Ewald, Gesch. d. Volks Israel, I. 78.
Wuttke, Zeitschr. der D. M. G., 1857.
Gesenius, Hebrew Grammar; Furst's Hebrew Lexicon.
Hist. des Langues Semitiques, I. p. 112.
- ↑ This is true also of the Egyptian, the Persian, and even the Buddhist-Chinese for transcribing Sanscrit sounds.
