Daily American telegraph., 1851-12-22

sent, by some name. That object in nature
which most resembled him in character would
be almost the only name that could be thought
of by tribe whose life and thoughts were
bound within the limit of their bodily percep-
tions. So one man would be called the OK, and
one the serpent their encampments would re-
quire names at a later stage of social progress,
and would receive names, upon which would,
! by that time, be constituted the established
principle. All this would lead to that improve
ment in rock-writing which we find among the
Mexican inscriptions. A man is figured, and
before his mouth is placed a little object---a
dove, or serpent, for example-which stands
4 there to signify the name of the individual
whom it was intended to depict BY means of
4 writing Of this kind, it would obviously be inn
possible to communicate any complex informa-
ton and at this time portable Inscriptions
could not in any way assist the business of
common life. 81 I5 III, tt,s
/ Coeval with the use of names signifying
4 qualities, and drawn from the outeE world,
there would arise habit of attaching external
ideas of matter to internal ideas of the mind;
courage, cowardice, prudence, &c., would be
represented habitually by emblems the soul
would begin to turn the world of matter to it's
own high use, and there would arise that fgu-
rative language, that poetry, which is the
habitual language of all savage communities
! that have made the first two or three steps to-
wards the development of human power. Ideas,
! which exist only in the mind, would now begin
| to multiply and preponderate over ideas found
ed upon bodily sensation The world without
would become more and more a storehouse of
emblenls to be used for tho depletion of a world
within. A lion for strength, serpent for SUBJ
tlety-objects would now commonly be drawn
to represent ideas; and now the writing still
scratched upon rocks and walls would be suf-
fcient to communicate much information to all
those who were accustomed to the symbols
| Let lis imagine, now, that community Of
men which has advanced so far in its writing
powers, and proportionately in the other
branches of its civilization, having formed into
a rude State makes war on another rude State
at distance, speaking another language. 1t
is victorious, and brings home captive a chief,
with barbarous name, like nothing in the
language of the yictors. The triumph must be
written on rock but how is the name of the
vanquished enemy to be recorded? Glory for
bid that it should not be put to shame Here
there would present itself difficulty to be mas
tered, and there would be but one way in
which it could be overcome. The spoken name
being series of sounds, it could be written, if
the sounds contained in it could be recorded.
In this way there would arise, and did arise, a
so to this day the Chinese, whose native writing
is an elaborate representation of ideas by OBJ
jects (deographic,) represent foreign names to
native ears in this phonetic way, as rudely as
we might express the sound of the word "arti-
| fee y by the three figures which stand for
heart-eye--fsh.
Our own alphabets, we know, are, in the
present day, thoroughly "phonetic n-each
letter represents sound and as we put letters
| together on paper, so we put sounds together
on our lips. 1t will be curious to show how
men, slowly and carefully. still felt their way
out of darkness, and by what slow stages we
travelled from the first necessity for phonetic
| scrap down to our present system. The in
quiry is not foreign to our purpose since our
purpose is to show how, generation after gen.
ward to obtain that power which is to-day ex-
ercised familiarly by the Miss Julia Mills, who,
| living in London, sends the overflowings of her
heart, under half an ounce in weight, to her
most confidential friend at Newcastle
We find one step to the extended use of a
phonetic system, when VIC pass from the Chi
nese to the matured practice of the ancient
Egyptians. The Egyptian hieroglyphics con-
| tain much that is phonetic in them They are
| written upon three systems at once. Where
an Egyptian sculpturing some story had to
express word that signiffed visible object,
easy to figure, there he simply figured it, and
put three dots thereafter, if it was a plural.
| Then he used the earliest and simplest form
the "figurative" writing. If the next word
represented an idea to which there was attach
ed a symbol, land there was fixed catalogue
of such symbols to guide him. he figured it
accordingly, and so used the advanced form of
symbolic y writing. If the next word chanced
| to be verb or something that could not be
represented either absolutely or by proxy then
he wrote it down, on u phonetic system, and
| the phonetic system was carried out in this
manner. The sound of B was represented by
any one of about half dozen natural objects
chosen for the purpose, whose names begin
with b ; for the letter c, a small collection was
set apart of animals, &c, whose names were
commenced with c.; and so on. The figures
to be used were fixed but for the representa-
ton of each sound, an option was given to the
sculptor, among five or six objects in order
that, when executing his work, he might rs
much as possible avoid " "tautology Or tauto-
fgury--too great run upon the sun moon,
too many crocodiles or ibises. Just as when,
in our own writing, the same word occurs two
or three times in few lines, we substitute for
| it, once ut least, n synonyme if possible; so the
| Egyptian writer if he saw that he produced
his crocodiles too fast and had care Of elc-
gance, had in the phonetic system reserve of
| figures, out of which he was at liberty to pick
the one which he found the least hackneyed
as a substitute.
| This Egyptian system of phonetics has
brought us now to the borders of our A B G.
But our letters are not pictures Of objects,
Although we tell our children that A stands
for apple, and B for bull we have not now to
tell them (as the Egyptians had to teach) that
apple stands for A, and bull for B. Faint