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Original Words Notes List

O r i g i n a l  W o r d s  N o t e s  A 4

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
 
 

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