alphabets - the
history:.Comprised
by E. C. Richardson.
An alphabet is a list of
the elementary
sounds used in any language.
More strictly speaking it is that particular series, commonly known as
the Phoenician or Canaanite
alphabet, which was in use in the region of Palestine
about B.C.E. 1000 and which
is the ancestor of nearly all modern written alphabets whether Semitic.or.European.
It is the alphabet therefore of Old Testament Hebrew
and Aramaic and New Testament Greek. It is an interesting fact, with
many practical bearings on text and exegesis,
that three sets of letters so very unlike in appearance as Hebrew, Greek
and modern English should be the same in origin and alike in nature. The
records in each are more like one another than either is like in its own
modern printed form.
The characteristics
of an alphabet are
(1) the
analysis of sounds into single letters rather than syllables or images,
(2) the
fixed order of succession in the letters,
(3) the
signs for the sounds, whether names or written symbols. Of these the analysis
into single letters, instead of whole words or syllables, is the characteristic
element. The order of the letters may vary, as that of the Sanskrit
does from the European and yet the list remains not only alphabetic but
the 'same' alphabet, i.e.
each sound represented by a similar name or written character.
2. Name:
The name
alphabet comes from the first two letters of the Greek, alpha and beta,
just as the old English name for the alphabet, abc or abece, is simply
the first three letters of the English alphabet and thus is merely an abbreviation
for the whole alphabet. It appears that the Greeks also used the first
and last letters of the alphabet (alpha and omega) as the Jews did the
first and last or the first, middle and last letters of their alphabet,
as abbreviation for the whole and in the same sense that in English one
says 'a to z'. Alpha and beta are themselves derived from the Semitic names
for the same letters.(aleph,
beth).and
have no meaning in the Greek.
3. Invention:
The question
of the invention of this alphabet differs from the question of the origin
of the written forms of the letters with which it is often confused and
relates to the recognition of the individual letters. Alphabetical language
whether written or spoken, inward or outward, is distinguished from the
pictographic, hieroglyphic
and syllabic
stages by this analysis into individual sounds or letters. It begins with
the picture, passes to the ideogram and syllable and from the syllable
to the letter. This is best seen in writing, but it is equally true in
speech. At the letter stage the alphabet begins. The character of a true
alphabet, as in all Semitic languages, has vowels not written at all.
4. Origin
of the Letters:
Few modern
questions are changing shape so rapidly as that of the historical predecessor
of the Canaanite or Phoenician alphabet. For a long time it was thought
that De Rouge had solved the problem by tracing the letters to the Egyptian
hieratic. This is the view of most of the popular literature of the present
time, but is wholly surrendered by most workers in the field now, in spite
of the fact that the latest studies in hieratic show a still greater resemblance
in forms (Moller, Hierat. Palaographie, 1909). Winckler and others have
claimed derivation from the Cuneiform, Praetorius from the Cypriote, Sayce
gets at least three letters from the Hittite, while Evans and others incline
to believe that the Minoan was the direct source of the alphabet, introduced
from Crete into Palestine by the Philistines who were Cretans, or at least
that the two are from a common ancestor, which is also the ancestor of
many other of the Mediterranean alphabets.
Some,
like Evans and Mosso, suggest that the letter forms may be traced to pictographs
depicted
in the caves of Europe. There is, in fact, an extraordinary resemblance
between some of the letters of the Phoenician alphabet and some of the
conventionalized signs found in these caves and it may not be too fantastic
to imagine that these early signs are the historic ancestors of the written
alphabetical characters, but that they were in any sense alphabetical themselves
is impossible if the invention of the alphabet was historical as here supposed.
(Harper’s Magazine, January, 1911).
5. Number
of Letters:
The ideal
written alphabet contains a separate character for each sound used in any
or every language. Practically in most languages the alphabet falls a good
deal short of the number of recognized sounds to be expressed in that language
and in pronouncing dictionaries they have to be analyzed by adding diacritical
marks.
The written
alphabet is always thus less than the number of sounds used. The Phoenician
and the Semitic alphabets generally had 22 letters, but they omitted the
vowels. English has 26, of which many have two or more sounds.
6. Names
of the Letters:
The names
of the Greek alphabet are derived
from the Semitic names that are meaningless in the Greek, while in the
Semitic it has been pretty clearly shown that they signify for the most
part some object or idea of which the earliest form of the written letter
was a picture. The forms of the letters are apparently derived from pictures
of the ox, house, etc., made linear and finally reduced to a purely conventional
sign which was itself reduced to the simplest writing motion. All this
has been boldly denied by Mr. Pilcher (PSBA, XXVI (1904), 168-73; XXVII
(1905), 65-68), and the original forms declared to be geometric; but he
does not seem to have made many converts, although he has started up rival
claimants to his invention.
The names
of the letters at least seem to indicate the Semitic origin of the alphabet,
since the majority of them are the Semitic names for the objects which
gave name to the letter and the picture of which gives form to the written
letter.
Following
is Sayce's list (PSBA, XXXII (1910), 215-22) with some variants:
(1) aleph
= ox;
(2) beth
= house (tent);
(3) gimel
= camel;
(4) daleth
= door;
(5) he
= house;
(6) waw
= nail (Evans, tent peg);
(7) zayin
= weapon;
(8) cheth
= fence;
(9) Teth
= cake of bread (Lidzbarski, a package);
(10) yodh
= hand;
(11) kaph
= palm of hand;
(12) lamedh
= ox-goad;
(13) mem
= water flowing;
(14) nun
= fish;
(15) camekh
=?;
(16) ayin
= eye;
(17) pe
= mouth;
(18) tsadhe
= trap (others, hook or nose or steps),
(19) qoph
= cage (Evans says picture is an outline head and Lidzbarski states it's
a helmet);
(20) resh
= head;
(21) shin
= tooth (not teeth);
(22) taw
= mark.
Not all of these meanings
are, however, generally accepted.
7. Order
of Letters:
The order
of the letters differs more or less in different languages, but it is in
the main the same in all the Semitic and Western alphabets derived from
the Phoenician alphabet and this is roughly the order of the English alphabet.
This order is, however, full of minor variations even among the Western
alphabets and in the Indian languages the letters are entirely regrouped
on a different principle.
The conventional order of
the Semitic
alphabet may be traced with some certainty in the Biblical books to as
early as B.C.E.
6th century.
8. The
Earliest Texts:
The chief
North Semitic texts are
(1) Moabite
stone.(circa
B.C.E. 850);
(2) inscriptions
of Zkr, Zenjirli, etc..(circa
B.C.E. 800);
(3) Baal-Lebanon
inscription.(circa
B.C.E. 750);
(4) Siloam
inscription.(circa
B.C.E. 700);
(5) Harvard
Samaritan ostraca.(time
of Ahab?);
(6) Gezer
tablet;
(7) various
weights and seals before B.C.E. 600. The striking fact about the earliest
inscriptions is that however remote geographically,
there is on the whole so little difference in the forms of the letters.
This is particularly true of the North Semitic inscriptions and tends to
the inference that the invention was after all not so long before the surviving
inscriptions. While the total amount of the earliest Palestine inscriptions
is not even yet very large, the recent discovery of the Samaritan ostraca,
the Gezer tablet, and various minor inscriptions, is at least pointing
to a general use of Semitic writing in Palestine at least as early as B.C.E.
the 9th century.
9. Changes
in Letter Forms:
The tendency
of letters to change form in consequence of changed environment is not
peculiar to alphabetical writing but is characteristic of the transmission
of all sorts of writing. The morphology of alphabetical writing has however
its own history. The best source for studying this on the Semitic side
is Lidzbarski's Handbuch (see below) and on the Greek side the best
first source is E. S. Roberts, Introduction to Greek Epigraphy (Cambr.).
The best synoptical statement of the Semitic is found in the admirable
tables in the Jewish Encyclopedia, V, i, 449-53. For the later evolution
of both Greek and Latin alphabets, E. M. Thompson's Introduction to
Greek and Latin Paleography, Oxford, 1912, is far the best Introduction.
In this he takes account of the great finds of papyri
which have so revolutionized the study of the forms of Greek letters around
the beginning of the Christian era, since his first Handbook was published.
In the
Hebrew, the old Phoenician alphabet
of the early inscriptions had in the
New
Testament times given way to the square Aramaic characters of the modern
Hebrew which possibly came into use as early as the time of Ezra.
LITERATURE.
Isaac Taylor's Alphabet
(2nd ed., 1899) is still useful for orientation and his article in the
HDB likewise, but Edward Clodd's little Story of the Alphabet (New
York, 1907), taken with Faulmann’s Geschichte der Schrift and Buch
der Schrift, is better for general purposes. For scientific purposes
see the bibliography prefixed to Lidzbarski's Handbuch der nordsemitischen
Epigraphik (1898, 2 vols) and his Ephemeris passim to date,
Evans' Scripta minoa, Oxf., 1909. See also C. G. Ball Origin
of the Phoenician Alphabet and Proceedings of the Society of Biblical
Archaeology, XV, 392-408; E. J. Pilcher's The Origin of the Alphabet,
PSBA, XXVI (1904), 168-73; Franz Praetorius
The Origin of the Canaanite
Alphabet, Smithsonian Rep. (1907), 595-604; S. A. Cook's, The Old
Hebrew Alphabet and the Gezer Tablet, PEFS (1909), 284-309. For Bible
class work, H. N. Skinner's Story of the Letters and Figures (Chicago,
1905) is very admirably adapted to the purpose. ...E. C. Richardson