The morning news., 1897-11-30
THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.
ITS BEGINNINGS TRACED INTO THE
MIsTS OF ANTIQUITY.

cohSiStehcteS-JuH uHEltnE with Its
Characters.
From the Detroit Free Press.
To invent and bring to protection the
score or so of handy symbols for the ex-
preston of spoken sounds, which we call
an alphabet, has proved to he the most ar
duous enterprise on which the human in
tellect has ever been engaged. It's achieve
ment tasked the genius Of the three most
gifted races of the ancient world 1t was
begun by the Egyptians, continued by the
Semites and finally perfected by the
Greeks.
From certain Egyptian hieroglyphic pic
lures which were in use long before tho
pyramids, it is possible to deduce the act
ual outlines of almost every letter of our
modern English alphabet; 10 recount the
history and to investigate the transforma-
ton of these ancient phonograms through
the period of 5000 years during which they
have been shaping; to trace also the unity
and the historical connection between all
the various existing alphabets of the
world
Writing began with kilograms pictures
representing either things or thoughts.
which afterward developed into phono-
grams (the graphic symbols of sounds).
Although our own writing has reached
the alphabetic stage, yet we still employ a
number of photographic and Geographic
signs The digits I, II, Ill stood as pic
lures of fingers.
The V was from the fingers collected and
the thumb apart; Wv or X represents the
two hands, while " and VI are only pic
lures of the hand with the subtraction or
addition of a finger. kilograms 5000 years
old, and which we are showing no poss-
hility of improving on, are such printers
signs as the index, exclamation and par
allel.
To these may be added certain shop
signs, such as the barber's pole, with its
spiral bandages, which was and is a sig
nificant ideogram of the blood-letter, and
the three balls of our pawnbrokers. II
the history of any one of our alphabetic
symbols be traced back 1t Will be found to
resolve itself ultimately into the conven-
tionalized picture of some object. 1t Is
marvellous that, despite long-continued US
age during so many centuries the modern
letter retains in almost every instance
manifest features derived from the prim-
Itive picture from which 1t has descended.
The letter NJ, for instance, was the pic.
ture of an OWL the conventionalizing pro-
cess of 5000 years having left only the
two peaks, which are the lineal descend
ants of the two ears of the owl, still re-
tanning between them not inapt repre-
sentation of the beak. while the vertical
strokes are all that remain of the out
lines of the breast.
If mankind is inclined to see a laugh on
he at w fnN
il in this case the owl probably feels
capable of suppressing any such gayety
by blinking mems attention to the mon
key. The letter F Is derived from the
horned Egyptian asp, the two bars beinA
the survival of the two horns, while the
vertical strokes represent the body.
The letter Y descended from the same
picture, the two horns and body being re-
tanned. Then. too. in those days there
was a four-horned asp, which has come
down to us in the. letter w, the four
strokes necessary to its making represent
ing the four horns although 5000 years
seem to have been n few too many for
the body, yet that of a Kansas grasshop-
per may be found supplemented by the
people 5000 years from now.
The letter was originally the picture
of an eagle, whose ancestry. by the way
makes Il the least American of all birds
Egypt being the eagles real homeland,
and r was taken from a picture of the
human mouth. ID was evolved from a pic
ture Of the hand. and so on through the
pictorial origin of all Our letters.
The immediate parentage of our English
alphabet is most difficult to determine. BY
a series of easy steps the forms of the
very letters the reader sees before him on
this printed page may be traced back for
some five-and-twenty centuries. These
Roman types" as they are appropriate
ly called have not varied apprecably in
their forms of the types used at Rome
and Venice by the italian printers of the
fifteenth century
The Roman capitals now used are prac-
ticaly identical with the letters employed
at Rome in the third century b. c. Thus
il appears that our English alphabet is a
member of that great Latin family of al
phabets whose geographical extension was
originally coterminous, or nearly so, with
the limits of the western empire and
afterward with the ancient obedience to
the Roman see.
1t is surprising to find how little change
has been effected during the tWenty-seven
centuries which divided the oldest Semitic
inscriptions from the present day. The
essential features In the outline of each
of our own letters may be detected with
out difficulty in the characters used by the
King of Moab.
The puzzle of all English literature Is
RlYltB twenty -biA lGltcIS an aTFAn2eInenE
by which they will present some new i'm
preston to the mind The more brilliant
that arrangement the more successful the
writer. The writer's of the English die
tionary alone have been able to fit more
than 1000 words constructed from these
letters without much effort; the language
is said to contain 10000.
AS our alphabet now stands-eVen after
5000 years of perfecting-it is q string
of singularly ambiguous signs, and af-
fords an unequaled opportunity for tor.
mentors, just as a man who cannot ex-
press himself clearly can be plagued with
sophisticated questions. The confusion
of English sound and letters
is well illustrated by spelling
coffee without one correct letter
-kauphy, which spelling is nearer the or
iginal than the one in use, for a pamphlet
was printed In oxford in 1859 on THE
Nature of the Drink Kauphi. or Coffee"
The artistically bad orthography OF
many of our funny writers Is made possi-
A CLEAR"HE