, 1888-11-08
oRIeIN oE ALPHAeETs.


The Letters A. = and o Survive All
Changes-InterestinG Historical Items.
When a child cries, the lips are apart,
and form, at each side of the mouth, a
sharp angle, with sides of about equal
length. The sounds of the crying are
those assigned to the first letter of almost
every alphabet. The arrow headed or
wedge shaped charactersi in use among the
old Babylonians and Persians till the time
of the great A~lexander's Asiatic conquests
were copied from the human mouth. By
means of different combinations these
wedges or AS were made to represent
%consonant as well as vowel sounds. But
the entire alphabet is made up of these
wedges. 1t required many generations
probably to advance from a and B. Now,
look at achild's face, sideways, when the
lips are shut, and you see a natural B.
Put these two letters together and we
have alb, which by being doubled gives
abba, the old eastern word for father. A
slight modification gives am, then ANNA,
the old eastern form of mama or
in the west, just as abba was changed
n papa and pope or holy father. The
arrow heads had served to record the
history, the literature, the religion of
mighty empires-the old Assyrian,
Median, and Persian. They were traced
mostly ON bricks. Paper had not yet been
50 much as dreamed of.
From A and B alpha and Beta) a
comprehensive scheme of phonetic char
acters must be worked out before the
leaf or rind of papyrus can be used for
writing on. The lip letters NJ and P,
softened into F and V, which last was
vocalized as q, are notifications merely
of B. We may safely say the same OF
h dental D, softened intoT. which gave
rise to S. A series of characters was
gradually worked out, and the time came
when Cadmus, the man from the East,
brought an alphabet of sixteen letters
from Phoenicia into Greece. Cadmus,
looked at as an individual man, dwindles
to a myth-a shadow. He expresses in
legendary form the outcome of a long
train of almost forgotten facts. These
sixteen letters were expanded by the
Greeks to twenty-four. Light wooden
tablets covered with wax for writing on
were adopted. But the pen was still of
solid iron, like a pencil, sharp at one end,
with q fiat circular head at the other for
blotting out, when desired, what had
been written with the point. These
tablets were fastened together at the
back by wires, SO t at they opened and
o1luI lint Oul . ) fOT HnDOTIaQJ
documents the { of the tables were
pierced with holes through which a triple
thread was passed and then sealed. 1t
is to this custom that a~llusion is made in
the Apocalypse-"close sealed with seven
seals" This Apocalyptic book was writ
ten within and on the back" The an
clients used to write on the front side
only-even after they had given up
wooden tablets in favor of papyrus and
parchment. The back was generally
stained saffron or yellow.
TIL old Italians, too, of prehistoric
age got an alphabet from the east. The
letters were extended and modified until
they became very different in form from
those of Greece. But it is remarkable
that A, B, and o survive all changes.
They are copies of the mouth when emit
ting the sounds assigned them. Modern
Typography has no doubt greatly i'm
proved the rude, early scrawl, such as
may still be seen on old gravestones. The
old Phoenician and old Hebrew Aleph has
not the same position as our modern A.
They are almost horizontal, with a nearly
perpendicular line drawn across the angle
formed by the sides of the letter. The
later Roman alphabet was spread by Ro-
man conquest. Our Anglo-Saxon fore
fathers at length adopted it. They man
aged to get up a sort of literature. But
the age of pocket dictionaries, handy
volumes, the daily or even weekly news
papers was still a long way off. Art and
discovery have still a long apprenticeship
before we a inundate our postofices
with valentines O. photograph instanta-
neously on paper the tail of some mighty
comet.-London Stationery Review.