This is one reason why radical changes are so difficult to bring about in institutions. These are social and therefore in a sense arbitrary. In mechanical or “practical” matters people adjust themselves to the pressure of new conditions more quickly. If a nation has been in the habit of wearing clothing of wool, and this material becomes scarce and expensive, some attempt will indeed be made to increase the supply of wool, but if production fails to keep pace with the deficiency, cotton is substituted with little reluctance. If, on the other hand, a calendar becomes antiquated, which could be changed by a simple act of will, by the mere exercise of community reason, a tremendous resistance is encountered. Time and again nations have gone on with an antiquated or cumbersome calendar long after any mediocre mathematician or astronomer could have devised a better one. It is usually reserved for an autocratic potentate of undisputed authority, a Cæsar or a Pope, or for a cataclysm like the French and Russian revolutions, to institute the needed reform. As long as men are concerned with their bodily wants, those which they share with the lower animals, they appear sensible and adaptable. In proportion however as the alleged products of their intellects are involved, when one might most expect foresight and reason and cool calculation to be influential, societies seem swayed by a conservatism and stubbornness the strength of which looms greater as we examine history more deeply.
Of course, each nation and generation regards itself as the one exception. But irrationality is as easy to discern in modern institutions as in ancient alphabets, if one has a mind to see it. Daylight saving is an example very near home. For centuries the peoples of western civilization have gradually got out of bed, breakfasted, worked, dined, and gone to sleep later and later, until the middle of their waking day came at about two or three o’clock instead of noon. The beginning of the natural day was being spent in sleep, most relaxation taken at night. This was not from deliberate preference, but from a species of procrastination of which the majority were unintentionally guilty. Finally the wastefulness of the condition became evident. Every one was actually paying money for illumination which enabled him to sit in a room while he might have been amusing himself gratis outdoors. Really rational beings would have changed their habits—blown the factory whistle at seven instead of eight, opened the office at eight instead of nine, gone to the theater at seven and to bed at ten. But the herd impulse was too strong. The individual that departed from the custom of the mass would have been made to suffer. The first theater opening at seven would have played to empty chairs. The office closing at four would have lost the business of the last hour of the day without compensation from the empty hour prefixed at the beginning. The only way out was for every one to agree to a self-imposed fiction. So the nations that prided themselves most on their intelligence solemnly enacted that all clocks be set ahead. Next morning, every one had cheated himself into an hour of additional daylight, and the illuminating plant out of an hour of revenue, without any one having had to depart from established custom; which last was evidently the course actually to be avoided at all hazards.
Of course, most individual men and women are neither idiotic nor insane. The only conclusion is that as soon and as long as people live in relations and act in groups, something wholly irrational is imposed on them, something that is inherent in the very nature of society and civilization. There appears to be little or nothing that the individual can do in regard to this force except to refrain from adding to its irrationality the delusion that it is rational.
140. The Sixth and Seventh Letters
The letters, such as Q, in which the Roman alphabet is in agreement with the original Semitic one and differs from classic Greek writing, might lead, if taken by themselves, to the conjecture that the ancient Italians had perhaps not derived their alphabet via the Greeks at all, but directly from the Phœnicians. But this conclusion is untenable: first, because the forms of the earliest Latin and Greek letters are on the whole more similar to each other than to the contemporaneous Semitic forms; and second because of the deviations from the Semitic prototype which the Latin and Greek systems share with each other, as in the vowels.
The sixth letter of the Roman alphabet, F, the Semitic Waw or Vau, is wanting in classic Greek, although retained in certain early and provincial dialects. One of the brilliant discoveries of classical philology was that the speech in which the Homeric poems were originally composed still possessed this sound, numerous irregularities of scansion being explainable only on the basis of its original presence. The letter for it looked like two Greek G’s, one set on top of the other. Hence, later when it had long gone out of use except as a numeral, it was called Di-gamma or “double-G.”
The seventh Semitic letter, which in Greek finally became the sixth on account of the loss of the Vau or Digamma, was Zayin, Greek Zeta, our Z. This, in turn, the Romans omitted, because their language lacked the sound. They filled its place with G, which in Phœnician and Greek came in third position. The shift came about thus. The earliest Italic writing followed the Semitic and Greek original and had C, pronounced G, as its third letter. But in Etruscan the sounds K and G were hardly distinguished. K therefore went out of use; and the early Romans followed the precedent of their cultured and influential Etruscan neighbors. For a time, therefore, the single character C was employed for both G and K in Latin. Finally, about the third century before Christ, a differentiation being found desirable, the C was written as C when it stood for the “hard” or voiceless sound K, but with a small stroke, as G, when it represented the soft or voiced sound; and, the seventh place in the alphabet, that of Z, being vacant, this modified character was inserted. Thus original C, pronounced G, was split by the Latins into two similar letters, one retaining the shape and place in the alphabet of Gimel-Gamma, the other retaining the sound of Gamma but displacing Zeta.
But the letter Z did not remain permanently eliminated from western writing. As long as the Romans continued rude and self-sufficient, they had no need of a character for a sound which they did not speak. When they became powerful, expanded, touched Greek civilization, and borrowed from this its literature, philosophy, and arts, they took over also many Greek names and words. As Z occurred in these, they adopted the character. Yet to have put it in its original seventh place which was now occupied by G, would have disturbed the position of the following letters. It was obviously more convenient to hang this once rejected and now reinstated character on at the end of the alphabet; and there it is now.
141. The Tail of the Alphabet
In fact, the last six letters of our alphabet are additions of this sort. The original Semitic alphabet ended with T. U was differentiated by the Greeks from F to provide for one of their vowel sounds. This addition was made at an early enough period to be communicated to the Romans. This nation wrote U both for the vowel U and the consonantal or semi-vowel sound of our W. To be exact, they did not write U at all, but what we should call V, pronouncing it sometimes U and sometimes W. They spelled cvm, not cum.