133. Presumptive Origins of Mixed Systems
For such a set concordance to grow up among all the diverse classes of one large nation would be very difficult. In fact, it seems that transitional systems of writing have originated among small groups with common business or purpose, whose members were in touch with one another, and perhaps sufficiently provided with leisure to experiment: colleges of priests, government archivists, possibly merchants with accounts. It is also clear that any system must reflect the culture of the people among whom it originates. The ancient Egyptians had no inns nor purses, but did have horned serpents and owls. Still more determining is the influence of the language itself, as soon as writing attempts to be phonetic. The words expressing pair and sieve are obviously something else in Egyptian than in English, so that if these signs were used, their sound value would be quite otherwise. Yet once a system has crystallized, there is nothing to prevent a new nationality from taking it over bodily. The picture values of the signs can be wholly disregarded and their sounds read for words of a different meaning; or the sounds could be disregarded, or the original proper forms of the characters be pretty well obliterated, but their idea value carried over into the other tongue. Thus the Semitic Babylonians took the Cuneiform writing from the Sumerians, whose speech was distinct.
It is also well to distinguish between such cases of the whole or most of a system being taken over bodily, and other instances in which one people may have derived the generic idea of the method of writing from another and then worked out a system of its own. Thus it is hard not to believe in some sort of connection of stimulus between Egyptian and Cuneiform writing because they originated in the same part of the world almost simultaneously. Yet both the forms of the characters and their meaning and sound values differ so thoroughly in Egyptian and Cuneiform that no specific connection between them has been demonstrated, and it seems unlikely that one is a modified derivative form of the other. So with the hieroglyphs of the Hittites and Cretans. They appeared in near-by regions somewhat later. Consequently, although their forms are distinctive and, so far as can be judged without our being able to read these systems, their values also, it would be dogmatic to assert that the development of these two writings took place without any stimulation from Egyptian or Cuneiform. Something of a similar argument would perhaps apply even to Chinese (ยง [251]), though on this point extreme caution is necessary. Accordingly if one thinks of the invention of the first idea of part-phonetic writing, it is conceivable that all the ancient systems of the Old World derive from a single such invention; although even in that event the Maya-Aztec system would remain as a wholly separate growth. If on the other hand one has in mind the content and specific manner of systems of the transitional type, Egyptian, Cuneiform, and Chinese, perhaps also Cretan and Hittite, are certainly distinct and constitute so many instances of parallelism. Even greater is the number of independent starts if one considers pure pictographic systems, since tolerable beginnings of this type were made by the Indians of the United States, who never even attempted sound representations.