Otto F. Ege

A

B

C-G

D

E

F

H

I-J

K

L

M-N

O

P

Q-R

S

T

U-V-Y

W

X-Z

Title: The Story of the Alphabet

Author: Otto F. Ege

Language: English

Character set encoding: UTF-8

E-text prepared by Roger Frank and Sue Clark
from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive
(https://archive.org)

Note:

Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/storyofalphabet00egeorich

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The

STORY OF

the

ALPHABET

By OTTO F. EGE

The Cleveland School of Art

“Many thanks to old Cadmus,

Who made us his debtors

By inventing, one day, those

CAPITAL LETTERS.”

—Saxe

PUBLISHED BY

NORMAN T. A. MUNDER & CO.

Printers

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

Do you know your A B C’s? Each Letter Character Has a History and a Reason for Its Present Form. Have you Ever Questioned the Origin and Significance of the Alphabet?

Our transition from barbarism to civilization can be attributed to the alphabet. Those great prehistoric discoveries and inventions such as the making of a fire, the use of tools, the wheel and the axle, and even our modern marvelous applications of steam and electricity pale into insignificance when compared with the power of the alphabet. Simple as it now appears after the accustomed use of ages, it can be accounted not only the most difficult, but also the most fruitful of all the achievements of the human intellect.

Man lived by “bread alone” and without the alphabet untold ages, and with a practical alphabetic system not more than 3,000 years. So important and wonderful was this step deemed by those who lived nearer the time of its inception—in the time before the wonder of its extraordinary powers had been blunted by long possession and common use—that its invention, as well as that of writing, was invariably attributed to divine origin.

Modern investigation always seeks sources other than mythological ones, and thus the science of ancient handwriting, paleography, came into existence. In the last hundred and twenty-five years the writing of the ancient Egyptians, which was a “sealed book” for nearly twenty centuries, has been deciphered through the efforts of Champollion and Young; the mysterious cuneiform characters of ancient Assyria and Babylon have been interpreted by Grotofend and Rawlinson, and the “missing link” to connect our present alphabetic system to these ancient ones is being partly completed by Sir Arthur Evans, who is compiling and analyzing Cretan characters and pre-Phoenician writing. The story, however, will probably never be told in its entirety.

The forms of our letters, with the exception of G, J, U, W, reached their full development two thousand years ago. The Roman letter was the parent of all the styles notwithstanding the diversity that has appeared in Europe since the beginning of the Christian era. With a little imagination it is not difficult to note the resemblance between similar letters of the old Roman capitals and those following that have been designated as script, italic, Old English or black letter, versal, uncial, and an endless list of alphabet families. The desire for speed, and the influence of the tool, pen, reed, chisel, brush, were the determining factors in the change of form. Curiously enough instead of being archaic, the Roman alphabet, which is now 2,000 years old, is still the most useful because of its legibility, and also the most beautiful.

We derived twenty-three of our letters from the Romans. They had taken probably eighteen of these from the Greeks about the fourth century B. C. and afterwards borrowed elsewhere or invented seven more. Instead of giving them names as the Greeks did, they simply called them by the sounds for which they stood: A (ah), B (bay). They introduced the curve wherever possible, whereas the early Greek letters were all angular—what an interesting analogy is evident in the architecture of those two peoples, the temple pediment and angularity of the Greeks as contrasted with the dome and arch of the Romans.

The Greeks, in their contact with those great traders and “Yankees of ancient time,” the Phoenicians, saw the value of their alphabetic writing and inaugurated its use about the time of the first Olympiad, 776 B. C. Three or four centuries before they gave it to the Romans the ancient Greeks found use for fifteen of the Phoenician letters and then conceived enough to round out an alphabet of twenty-four characters.The changes that took place in the shape of their letters can be attributed to their sense of order; the letters are balanced better and the parts better related.

The Greeks were interested in the sound value only, not in the picture value of the symbol, and, therefore, they probably did not notice that A, for instance, had ever been a picture of the head of an ox and that it was now drawn upside down; and that the Phoenician name “Alpeh” meant ox and that they mispronounced the sound in calling it “Alpha.”

The Romans borrowed from the Greeks and the Greeks had borrowed from the Phoenicians, but where did the Phoenicians obtain their letters? Did they invent them? To what extent were these letters influenced by earlier systems of writings as those employed by the Cretan, Assyrian and Egyptian civilizations? These are questions that probably will never be answered satisfactorily. Many arguments and theories are advanced. We can, however, trace back with certainty a number of our letters to the Phoenician alphabet of 1000 B. C. Beyond this all is, at present, a matter of conjecture.

The Phoenician alphabet consisted of twenty-two pictures of familiar objects. These pictures were rudely and simply made, for writers and readers soon recognized the fundamental characteristics and all unnecessary details were eliminated. The great advance that can be credited to them is that they realized that a small number of sound-expressing characters, if well selected, are sufficient to express any word. Other races at this period had phonetic systems but they consisted of numerous symbols and cumbersome appendages of non-alphabetic characters—“eye pictures” side by side with “ear pictures.” No doubt earlier Phoenician writing passed through the stages of development traceable in so many countries:

1. The pictures or characters suggesting the thing or incident (picture writing).
2. The pictures or characters symbolizing the thing or idea (ideographic or symbolic writing).
3. The pictures or characters representing the sound of the thing or idea (phonograms).
4. The sign suggesting the various sounds of the language (alphabetic system).

To free this last stage from the others was the great Phoenician contribution.