Knoxville journal. [volume] (Knoxville, Iowa) 1874-1986, 1874-07-09
Alphabets.

| A WRITER in Leisure Hour thus ana
lyzes the alphabet and furnishes a very
curious and entertaining article:
| ! have before me copies of some four
score alphabets, classified into eastern and
tCestern. As | compare these different
sets of phonetic symbols, the questions
arise Why does the letter A stand first
in almost every one of themg Why is it
followed Immediately by b? Whence
the shape or form of both these charac-
| tiers? In answer to the first question,
Jacob Grimm, in his "Deutsches Wor-
| tcrbuch," says: " A is the noblcst and
| earliest Of all sounds, issuing full from
| the chest and throat, which the child
learns first and most easily to express,
and which the alphabets of most Ian
| guages rightly place first" Let me also
| quote Noah Webster: :" A is naturally
| the first letter, because it represents the
| first vocal sCdnd naturally formed by the
human organs, being the sound uttered
with a mere opening of the mouth with
out constraint, and without any effort to
alter the natural position or configura-
ton of the lips" Other writers go so far
as to ascribe not only the sounds, but the
visible forms of the letters, to the same
origin. Each side of child's mouth,
when uttering this sound, gives likewise
copy Of A. The lips are apart, forming
an acute angle with sides of equal
length. The perpendicular position in
present use is not the oldest mode of
writing this symbol. The Oldest Eastern
forms are nearly horizontal | do not
here take into account the little q, which
is evidently q modification OF o. The
first sound puts the lips apart-in antith-
esis; the second, b, shuts them-causes
synthesis. Now, look upon the side of IL
child's face and you see a b formed by
the closed lips; not, however, the we'll
rounded letter of modern Typography
this belongs to higher degree of art
but slender form, such as may be seen
on old gravestones, or in copies of old
Greek and Italian Inscriptions The
PhPnician and old Hebrew shapes are
still nearer the scrawl which children
make in their first attempts at writing
Let us see now what the child can say
with these two vocables, keeping in mind
that M and p are merely notifications of
b, both in speaking and in writing. Long
ago in the East it learned to name its
father ab and its mother am These are
probably the oldest words in human
speech. They are monosyllables, the nat
ural result of child's capacity of articu-
lation, an historical necessity. Names of
the objects nearest and dearest to it are
the child's first words. But these one
syllable names are soon doubled--they be.
come abba or papa and ANNA or mamma
As sacred name applied TO the SUI
preme Being, abba has its historical rise
in Assyria. 1t travels westward and be-
comes an epithet of ecclesiastical supe-
riors. As bahia IL passes to the Bishop of
Alexandria; it comes to Rome in the
form of papa, holy father. 1t Is used by
Jew and Gentle as u secular name for
father. In the Russian language,
without an alphabet till late in the
ninth century of our era, it appears as
bahia, but means an old roman, In Spanish
il is likewise bahia, and signifies satsUd, or
slauer, such as issues from the mouth of a
child. In short, 1t becomes babe, baby
Father and child, papa and baby, are com
plements one of the other, mutual correl-
atives in word and in fact. Let me re-
mark here that the form of the word
Babel is worth reconsideration Horne
Tooke showed, more than eighty years
ago, that "all our words, even those that
are expressions of the incest operations
of our minds, were originally borrowed
from the objects Of external perception. y
Well, If words are borrowed from things,
there arises a presumption at least that
symbols or letters employed to represent
words are also borrowed from things.
In point of fact, our ten fingers have
determined our decimal system of arith-
metic. These same fingers have been
used as copies for The primary elements
of the Roman notation. We have
l, III, III, iii, as on clocks and
watches-plain limitations of the four
| fingers But how did v come TO Indicate
| five? Look at your open hand, with the
! thumb on one side, distended from the
| four fingers kept together on the other.
and you have u natural v. So much for
| the left hand. Proceed now similarly
with the fingers of the right and they
| lead us up to ten, represented by X or
| two VS. A basis of number is thus oh.
| tanned from our own bodies, which basis
may be amplified and modified to an
| indefinite extent | need scarcely oh.
serve that the mode of writing four and
aine--IV and KIN our Bibles. for
! instance, were after improvements.