Evening star., 1928-06-18
WORLD ALPHAbETS
MAINLY BORROWED
Turkeys Decision to Adopt
New One Held Not With
out Precedent.

The decision of Turkey to throw over
board the alphabet she has used for
many centuries, and to replace it with
the alphabet of Western Europe and
the Americas. is not so revolutionary a
step as at first appears, according TO
q bulletin from the National Geographic
Society
1T is not as If Turkey were uproot-
Ing some cherished cultural growth and
setting I'D in its place a foreign substi-
tute." saws the bulletin No true alpha
bet can be found in use today by a
people who originated it. When it
comes to alphabetS all the world has
borrowed. Il is an amazing thing, but
the problem Of resolving human speech
into its thirty-odd sounds and repre-
senting them by symbols seems to have
been solved only once--within historic
times at ieast-and from this happy bit
Of analysis and invention all the true
alphabets in use today appear to have
descended.
Origin of English Alphabet
"The English alphabet came directly
from the Latin. It is, in fact. the same
alphabet that Rome used save for such
minor changes as the addition of a
separate y tthe Latin T. served for
both + and ~, and the expansion of
the Latin wv into 'UVW'
The Romans, in turn, borrowed their
alphabet from the Greeks, changing
the forms of the letters somewhat and
dropping some characters And the
Greeks. as evidence and tradition show,
took their letter system from the
Phoen;cians. even retaining the names
with slight variations.
In passing the alphabet through
their hands the Greeks gave 1t one OF
Its most important additions. They
added definite vowel symbols TO the
Phoenician alphabet, which consisted
solely Of % consonants. The Greeks
'tinkered' further with the alphabet so
that the Athenian version, including
vowels. came to have "a letters. They
also Changed the direction of writing.
The Phoenicians wrote from right TO
left; the Greeks adopted the left-to-
right direction now employed by all
the Western World.
Widely Divergent Theories.
THE greatest problem in connection
with the alphabet is to determine where
the Phoenicians got it. There have
been widely divergent theories as to
this. II has been variously suggested
that the - characters were adopted
AA4C ll4CAOEISE anu 4hCk dtAA
writing Of Egypt. the cuneiform char
acters Of Babylon and symbols of the
HittiteS. Cretans and ancient Greeks.
No evidence so far found seems suffl-
Gent 70 determine the matter. Prob
ably the most generally accepted theory
Is that the Phoenicians. familiar be-
cause OF their trading voyages with the
various cumbersome writing systems
around the Mediterranean. chose from
them such symbols as they needed,
stripped OF the complications and SIM
piified writing for the first time 10 a
nearly true aiphabeiic basis.
THE Phoenicians are supposed to
have been urged to this step by the de-
sire 70 conserve time in keeping their
accounts and records Of trading ven-
lures. II is 10 the busting. impatient
Rabbits OF some 1000 years ago. there
fore. that the world probably owes the
device that has made possible the great
advances IN literature and science and
practically all Of the continuing activi-
ties Of civilization
We take the alplabet-and all these
words that are built from 1t with which
20 record the sfladings OF our ideas-so
much as matter of course that 1t is
difhclilt TO realize that for thousands
and perhaps tens of thousands of years
man had no better method of recording
MS thonghfs than with a tumble Of pic