In addition to this conventionality of form of characters, there is to be distinguished also a conventionalization of meaning which is inherent in the nature of writing. Conventionalization of form accompanies frequency or rapidity of writing, conventionalization of meaning must occur if there is to be any writing at all. It develops in pure non-phonetic pictography if this is to be able to express any considerable range of meaning. An outstretched hand may well be used with the sense of “give.” But the beholder of the picture-writing is likely to interpret it as “take.” Here is where conventionalization is necessary: it must be understood by writers and readers alike that such a hand means “give” and not “take,” or perhaps the reverse, or perhaps that if the palm is up and the fingers flat the meaning is “give” whereas the palm below or the fingers half closed means “take.” Whatever the choice, it must be adhered to; the standardized, conventional element has entered. That is why one customarily speaks of “systems” of writing. Without the system, there can be not even picture-writing, but only pictures, whose range of power of communication is far more limited.
When the phonetic phase begins to be entered, conventionalization of meaning is even more important. An inn must be distinguished from a house by its shield, a house from a barn by its chimney, and so on. The shield will perhaps have to be exaggerated to be visible at all, be heart-shaped or circular to distinguish it from windows; and so forth. So with the phonetic values. A syllable like English “per” might be represented by one scribe by means of a cat with a wavy line issuing from its mouth to denote its purr; by another by a pear; by a third, by something that habitually came as a pair, such as earrings. Any of these combined with a “sieve” symbol would approximately render the work “per-ceive.” But some one else might hit upon the combination of a purse and the setting sun at eve. Obviously there has got to be a concordance of method if any one but the writer is to read his inscription readily. This correspondence of representation and interpretation is precisely what constitutes a set of figures into a system of writing instead of a puzzle.
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 (§ [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.
134. Phonetic Writing: the Primitive Semitic Alphabet
The last basic invention was that of purely phonetic writing—the expressing only of sounds, without admixture of pictures or symbols. Perhaps the most significant fact about this method as distinguished from earlier forms of writing is that it was invented only once in history. All the alphabetic systems which now prevail in nearly every part of the earth—Roman, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Indian, as well as many that have become extinct—can be traced back to a single source. The story in this case is therefore one of diffusion and modification instead of parallelism.
What circumstance it was that caused this all-important invention to be made, is not known, unfortunately, though time may yet bring knowledge. There is even division of opinion as to the particular system of mixed writing that was drawn upon by the first devisers of the alphabet, or that served as jumping off place for the invention. Some have looked to the Egyptian system, others to a Cuneiform or Cretan or Hittite source of inspiration. Nor is it wholly clear who were the precise people responsible for the invention. It is only certain that about 1,000 B.C., or a little earlier, some Semitic people of western Asia, in the region of the Hebrews and Phœnicians, probably the latter themselves, began to use a set of twenty-two non-pictorial characters that stood for nothing but sounds. Moreover, they represented the sounds of Semitic with sufficient accuracy for anything in the language to be written and read without trouble. These twenty-two letters look simple and insignificant alongside the numerous, beautiful, and interesting Egyptian hieroglyphs. But on them is based every form of alphabet ever used by humanity.