BY an alphabet we mean a list of symbols which represent conventionally to the eye the sounds which are heard in the speech of a nation. An alphabet will therefore be perfect if the number of its symbols exactly corresponds to the number of simple sounds which are commonly distinguishable in the spoken language. But this perfection has probably never yet been reached: all known alphabets have failed, either by defect, i.e., from not representing all the simple sounds; or by redundancy, in having more than one symbol for the same sound. They must also necessarily become imperfect by lapse of time. No nation keeps the sound of its language unaltered through many centuries: sounds change as well as grammatical forms, though they may endure longer, so that the symbols no longer retain their proper values; often, too, several different sounds come to be denoted by the same symbol; and in strictness the alphabet should be changed to correspond to all these changes. But little inconvenience is practically caused by the tacit acceptance of the old symbol to express the new sound; indeed the change in language is so gradual that the variation in the values of the symbols is imperceptible. It is only when we attempt to produce the exact sounds of the English language less than three centuries ago that we realise the fact that if Shakespeare could now stand on our stage he would seem to us to speak in an unknown tongue; though one of his plays, when written, is as perfectly intelligible now as then. Such changes of sound are most developed in countries where many different dialects, through conquest, immigration, or otherwise, exist side by side: they are checked by the increase of education and by facility of locomotion—both of which causes tend to assimilate all dialects to that one which by some lucky chance has become the literary speech of the nation.

The term alphabet has come to us from the Latin alphabetum, which, however, occurs in no prose writer before Tertullian. It could not have been used, for metrical reasons, by Juvenal, when he wrote, “Hoc discunt omnes ante alpha et beta puellae ”—their a b c. But there is no reason why it should not have existed earlier: the word was borrowed from the Greek, as seems clear from the compound αναλφάβητος, which is as old as the comedian Philyllius (Meineke, Com. Frag. ii. 857), and he was alive in 392 b.c. It does not seem likely that this compound adjective would have been coined if the noun itself had not already existed in the same sense which it now bears.

The symbols of our alphabet are nearly those of the Latin; these in their turn were borrowed from a Greek alphabet; and there seems no reasonable ground for doubting the common tradition that the Greeks derived their characters from a Phoenician source. All these borrowings will be fully described hereafter. At this point absolute certainty ends. We cannot prove to demonstration the origin of our alphabet; but positive facts and analogical arguments may be adduced which enable us to attain a very high degree of probability. It is now commonly believed that the characters were originally hieroglyphics, and in that ultimate form were devised in Egypt. There, for convenience of writing, they took a simpler form (called hieratic). In this shape they were borrowed by the Phoenicians; and thus, in their long course down to us, they passed gradually from being the written expression of an idea into the written expression each of a single sound. It is true that the proof is not clear throughout: sometimes the links are feeble, and here we have to employ the analogy of other languages, in which the particular step which we want to prove has undoubtedly been made under similar circumstances. Still, it may with some truth be said that we can only prove the possibility of such a process, while any given alphabet may have had a perfectly independent origin; the Phoenician alphabet may have been developed in Phoenicia itself, and never been hieroglyphic at all. But this is very difficult to conceive. The a priori argument for the derivation of phonetic from hieroglyphic characters is strong. Hieroglyphics have unquestionably been the first attempt of many nations in a rude state to record their thoughts in a permanent and universally intelligible form. It is also certain that these hieroglyphics have undergone progressive degradation of shape, so that their visible connection with the thing signified was often lost; they became in many cases the expression of those combinations of sounds by which the things were denoted in the spoken language, though they still generally retained their original value as well. Here, at all events, a certain connection between hieroglyphics and sounds establishes itself; and a priori it is more probable that all alphabets should have derived the single sounds of which they consist from hieroglyphics, through the medium of their derived phonetic values, than that any alphabet should have been produced independently of hieroglyphics (which are admitted to have existed), by some arbitrary process of formation for which absolutely no testimony can be adduced. As we have said above, such a process is not impossible, and may be true for any particular alphabet; but the opposite theory has the most internal probability and all the evidence of which the case admits. Against this it seems insufficient to urge (as has been done) that there exist upon earth savages who have never developed any alphabetic writing out of their rude attempts—a fact which may be readily granted; or that civilised men often return to the simple' methods employed by uncivilised nations, such as cutting notches on sticks or tying knots in strings—such return being apparently adduced to prove that two totally different methods of expression can co-exist without there being any tendency to pass from one to the other; nay, it is added that in Egypt the hieroglyphic and the common (or demotic) character did certainly exist side by side; and if the latter were borrowed from the former, it would have superseded it, which it did not do. Now, in answer to this, reasons will appear shortly why the hieroglyphic characters lingered so persistently, even when the later phonetic character was in common use—nay, in the very same inscription or document with the hieroglyphic. Still, the argument would have some weight if it were not grounded on the false assumption that the demotic alphabet was a purely phonetic one, totally unconnected with its more aged rival. But modern research has proved incontestably that the demotic characters can be traced back to their original hieroglyphic shape through the medium of the hieratic; in fact, that the cumbrous hieroglyphics were successively put into more and more abbreviated shapes, for convenience of writing, as its use increased.

Excluding, then, attempts of savages such as have been mentioned above, which were neither durable nor intelligible enough to make them of service, except for the smallest number of men during the most limited time— excluding these as not deserving the name, we derive all real writing from hieroglyphics, such hieroglyphics being either purely pictorial, the expression of visible objects in the external world; or symbolic, when some external object is conventionally chosen to represent some action or some abstract idea. These two methods were probably nearly contemporaneous in their origin, because the necessity of writing at all supposes a considerable advance in civilisation, and therefore a considerable development of ideas. To this system as a whole the convenient term ideography is now generally applied. From this men have passed to phonetic writing, first, apparently, in the form of syllabism, in which each syllable of a word is regarded as an independent whole and represented by a single sign; then from this to alphabetism, in which the syllable is no longer denoted by an indivisible symbol, but is resolved into vowel and consonant, each with its own accepted sign.

It seems probable that all known alphabets (with one or two possible exceptions) may be traced back to four or five parents. These have differed much in fruitfulness, but all were originally hieroglyphic. These five systems of writing are the Egyptian, the cuneiform, the Chinese, the Mexican or Aztec, and the curiously cumbrous characters of Yucatan and central America: these last may be seen interspersed with figurative paintings in a facsimile given by Μ. de Rosny at p. 20 of his very useful little summary, Les Ecritures Figuratives des Di ffe rents Peuples Anciens et Modernes. Of these, the first three alone can be said to have had any great extension; and the first, if the Phoenician, and by consequence the European alphabets, were derived from it, far exceeds in importance all the rest together. These systems were perfectly independent, and developed themselves, each in the same course, but in its own manner, and each in the main to a different degree. At certain points in their history all but one became crystallised, and remained to show us the steps by which the progress to phonetism can be made. We do not propose to describe here fully any of these systems of hieroglyphics. We are only concerned to point out their relative degrees of development, their deficiencies, and the consequent motives which must have impelled men by degrees to the production of a genuine alphabet.

There are obvious deficiencies even in the most highly developed hieroglyphics. In the first place, they must have been excessively burdensome to the memory. They speedily lost their original form, which was in most cases too cumbrous to be retained when writing became frequent; their pictorial value was therefore lost, and the new form could not generally have been intelligible to a learner, who was thus obliged to acquire by memory an enormous number of symbols, compared with which even the Sanskrit alphabet may be regarded as easy. Secondly, it is impossible by hieroglyphics to express grammatical relations: the order, indeed, in which the symbols are placed may denote the distinction between subject and object; plurality may be expressed by the repetition of a symbol; some even of the relations in space, denoted in more advanced languages by cases, may be pictorially rendered; but all these helps do not go far to remedy this obvious want. Experience, however, shows how much inconvenience a nation will undergo rather than make any radical change in its phonetic system. We have only to look at our own alphabet, with its numerous and universally confessed deficiencies and redundancies, and then remember the fruitless attempts which have been made to work a reform in it, to be convinced that no people will of its own accord strike out a thoroughly new system of writing. Such revolutions can only be produced by the meeting of two different civilisations, and the reception by the one of the arts and ideas of the other. But such a meeting may, and more commonly does, only stimulate the inferior race to some partial development. For the new ideas new names are required: these may be metaphorically represented out of the old vocabulary, as when the Romans called the unknown elephant the Lucanian ox, and of course wrote it so. But suppose the inferior people to be one which has not yet advanced beyond hieroglyphic writing; their simplest and most obvious plan will be to take the strange name, and express it by those symbols out of their old stock which denote the nearest sounds to that of the name required. Such symbols then cease to represent ideas only, as they used to do; they are consciously employed to represent mere sounds, and thus arise the first beginnings of phonetism. A good example of this process may be found in the Aztec (Lenormant, i. 29; De Rosny, p. 19, who also gives others). When Christianity was introduced into Mexico, the Lord’s Prayer was reduced to writing in the following manner :—The Mexican symbols nearest to the two syllables of pater were a flag (sounded a s pantli), and a rock (tetl) :pater was therefore represented pictorially by a flag and a rock; we cannot tell whether it was sounded as pan-tetl, or only as pa-te— the nearest possible equivalent in the Mexican language, which has no r. Similarly, noster was phonetically represented by noch-tetl, pictorially by the Indian fig (nochtli) and the rock as before. Here, then, we have the application of symbols to denote sound without regard to the original sense; just as we might draw the figures of an eye, a saw, and a horse, and convey by them the idea, “I saw a horse.” The Aztec would not long have the ideas of a flag, a rock, and a fig presented to his mind when he read these symbols; and so the first conception of phonetism was gained, the first move from hieroglyphic to alphabetic writing. Yet he had not attained the first real step in the progress— i.e., syllabic writing—because if he had decomposed his new words, pan would not have represented to his mind merely so much sound—a syllable by itself meaningless: it would have given him only the idea of a flag. And further than this the Aztec language did not pass: probably it only reached this stage incompletely with a small number of words. The great advance to syllabic writing is to be found elsewhere; first in the Chinese, perhaps through the accident of the monosyllabic nature of the language; but with a clearly-developed purpose in the Aramaic cuneiform inscriptions.

In the Chinese written character we find a considerable number of symbols which were unquestionably at first pictorial. Though but very slight vestiges of their original meaning can now be seen in them, yet they can be traced back to older forms which are unmistakeable; and their origin is further attested by the name “images,” which the Chinese give them, as distinguished from others which they call “letters.” These symbols were simple, and denoted very ingeniously natural objects—the sun (by a circle with a dot inside), the moon (by a crescent with a line inside), a mountain (by three peaks side by side), rain (by drops under an overarching line), a child (thus ), a mother ( , a figure expressing the arms and bosom effectively enough), &c. These symbols could be combined: thus the symbols for water and eye combined denoted tears, an ear and a door expressed hearing and understanding; but such combinations of pure hieroglyphics were rare, as they would have been liable to be confused with combinations of the same kind used in a different way, as will be seen immediately. There were also some hieroglyphs used symbolically; e.g., a hand to denote a workman, the two valves of a shell-fish to denote friends. These also are few in number, and not very ingenious. Last in this class come some symbols which are essentially pictorial, though they represent no visible object; e.g., “above” was expressed by a dot above a horizontal line; "below,” by a dot below it; the numerals one, two, three, by so many horizontal lines; “right,” by the symbol "left,” by , &c. So far, we have simple hieroglyphs, or ideograms (a more convenient term),—pictorial representations, expressing not merely visible objects, but also abstract ideas, and even actions; but each of these could also have the phonetic value of the name of the object which it depicted.

Distinct from these are the “letters ”—in use, though not in origin. These have two parts—one, a symbol which was originally an ideogram, and which could still be used as such, but which in this particular combination lost its ideographic value, and retained only the phonetic value of the name of its object; the other, an ideogram, which laid aside its phonetic value, and only restricted to a particular class the phonetic symbol which it accompanied. Thus, for example, the ideogram of a ship had also the phonetic value tcheu—i.e., the name denoting ship in the spoken language; the ideogram of fire had the phonetic value hv ó : these two symbols combined were still pronounced tcheu, and meant the flickering of flame. The second symbol dropped its phonetic value altogether, but kept the generic idea of fire: the ship was lost, but the idea of undulating motion modified that of fire, and the complex symbol combined the two ideas, with the one sound tcheu. Similarly, the ideogram ship and speech combined expressed loquacity, and this in the spoken language was also tcheu, the phonetic value of the symbol for speech being dropped, just like that of the symbol fire above. In this way there are ten different ideas given by Endlicher (p. 10), all called in the spoken language tcheu, and all expressed to the eye by different complex symbols formed on this principle. These symbols, he reckons, form at least 29 / 30 ths of the written language.

This is a very imperfect sketch of the Chinese system of writing, and into the history of the “keys,” which indeed belong rather to Chinese lexicography, we do not propose to enter. But it is enough to throw light on some questions connected with our subject. First of all, we see ideography and phonetism existing side by side; and even the same symbol, having in most cases (not in all) either an ideographic or a phonetic value at will. Therefore, in this case the passage from the one system to the other may be considered as certain; but how it was made there is not sufficient evidence to show. It must have been earlier than the combination of pure ideograms mentioned above. It was probably greatly facilitated by the Chinese being a monosyllabic language; each syllable is a complete word in itself, expressing a complete notion: hence the idea of completeness and individuality would attach to such a combination of sound more easily than would be possible in polysyllabic language; and it would seem more natural to give that sound a symbol for itself, quite apart from its ideographic meaning. Further, as the whole number of single syllables of which the language consists is only 450, the effort of remembering the symbols could not be great, and the memory must have been already trained in that direction, because the symbols (even in their ideographic acceptation) had lost their obviously pictorial character, and must have been kept by the memory, not recognised each time by the eye; just as children, in learning to read, commonly remember short and familiar words as a whole, without analysing them into the component letters.

The explanation of the cumbrous “letters” described above is simple; and it will show us, secondly, how so apparently monstrous a system of writing could be maintained, and has been in its essence maintained, down to the present day. With so few radical sounds in the language, it was inevitable that many different objects must have been expressed, as ideas grew and multiplied, by the same sound, as we saw above that there were eleven different ideas (including the ship itself) all called tcheu. These could be distinguished in the spoken language by tone or accent, and actually were so distinguished. But how were they to be distinguished in writing? Now, writing is but the visible exponent of language, and therefore is naturally formed under the same conditions—those conditions which, because the effect is obvious while the reason is often difficult to detect, we vaguely call the genius of the language: and it must accommodate itself to the defects as well as the strength of the language. There is an inherent evil in Chinese speech—inevitable in a monosyllabic language with a limited number of radicals—that the same combination of sound should serve to express many different ideas. A combination, therefore, of symbols is absolutely necessary, which shall represent to the mind through the eye the fact that the sound which is heard has changed its meaning to meet that of another sound which is not heard—that tcheu no longer means a ship, but means the flickering of flame, or something else quite different. It would have been easy enough to have had different symbols for the different meanings of tcheu; but it would not practically have been so convenient, because it would not have represented so well the facts of the language. If the Chinese had chosen in their speech to do universally what they did occasionally, to form compounds like “ear-dooring” for “hearing” a thing, the native genius for pictorial representation would have produced a symbolism which might have supplied all its wants down to the present day. But that was not the bent of the language; and the writing therefore remains to the present day a mixture of ideography and phonetism, and is perhaps better so. Still, a great deal of confusion is possible. In modern writing, according to Endlicher, each syllable has several symbols, partly because of the extraordinary...