The earliest extant example of the primitive Semitic alphabet[22] is on the famous Moabite Stone of King Mesha, who in the ninth century before Christ erected and inscribed this monument to commemorate the successful defense of Moab against the invading Hebrews. Now Moab was a little and rude country, somewhat off the roads of commerce and civilization. It is hardly likely, therefore, that the Moabites were the inventors of the alphabet. It is much more probable that the system was perfected, perhaps several centuries earlier, by a wealthier and more important people, one more in contact with foreign nations, such as the Phœnicians, and that from them it spread to their neighbors, the Hebrews, Moabites, and Aramæans of Syria. This spread must have been facilitated by the close kinship of the speech of these nations, enabling any of them to adopt the alphabet of another without material modification.
The Phœnicians founded Carthage, and consequently the Carthaginian or Punic writing until after the extinction of the great trading city was also Phœnician.
135. The Greek Alphabet: Invention of the Vowels
More important was the spread of the Phœnician letters to an entirely foreign people, the Greeks, whose language was largely composed of different sounds and possessed a genius distinct from that of the Semitic tongues. The Greeks’ own traditions attest that they took over their alphabet from the Phœnicians. The fact of the transmission is corroborated by the form of the letters and by their order in the alphabet. It is also proved very prettily by the names of the letters. As we speak of the ABC, the Greeks spoke of the Alpha Beta—whence our word “alphabet.” Now “alpha” and “beta” mean nothing in Greek. They are obviously foreign names. In the Semitic languages, however, similar names, Aleph and Beth, were used for the same letters A and B, and meant respectively “ox” and “house.” Evidently these names were applied by the Semites because they employed the picture of an ox head to represent the first sound in the word Aleph, and the representation of a house to represent the sound of B in Beth. Or possibly the letters originated in some other way, and then, names for them being felt to be desirable, and the shape of the first rudely suggesting the outline of an ox’s head and the second a house, these names were applied to the characters already in use.
The third letter of the alphabet, corresponding in place to our C and in sound to our G, the Greeks called Gamma, which is as meaningless as their Alpha and Beta. It is their corruption of Semitic Gimel, which means “camel” and may bear this name because of its resemblance to the head and neck of a camel. The same sort of correspondence can be traced through most of the remaining letters. From these names alone, then, even if nothing else were known about the early alphabets, it would be possible to prove the correctness of the Greek legend that they derived their letters from the Phœnicians. A people who themselves invented an alphabet would obviously name the letters with words in their own language, and not with meaningless syllables taken from a foreign speech.
The Greeks however did more than take over the alphabet from the Phœnicians. They improved it. An outstanding peculiarity of Semitic writing was that it dispensed with vowels. It represented the consonants fully and accurately, in fact had carefully devised letters for a number of breath and guttural sounds which European languages either do not contain or generally neglect to recognize. But, as if to compensate, the Semitic languages possess the distinctive trait of a great variability of vowels. When a verb is conjugated, when it is converted into a noun, and in other circumstances, the vowels change, only the consonants remaining the same, much as in English “sing” becomes “sang” in the past and “goose” changes to “geese” in the plural. Only, in English such changes are comparatively few, whereas in Semitic they are the overwhelming rule and quite intricate. The result of this fluidity of the vowels was that when the Semites invented their letters they renounced the attempt to write the vowels. Apparently they felt the consonants, the only permanent portions of their words, as a sort of skeleton, sufficient for an unmistakable outline. So, with their ordinary consonants, plus letters for J and V which at need could be made to stand for I and U, and the consistent employment of breaths and stops to indicate the presence or absence of vowels at the beginning and end of words, they managed to make their writing readily legible. It was as if we should write: ’n Gd w’ trst or Ths wy ’t. Even to-day the Bible is written and read in the Jewish synagogue by this vowelless system of three thousand years ago.
In the Greek language more confusion would have been caused by this system. Moreover, the alphabet came to the Greeks as something extraneous, so that they were not under the same temptation as the Phœnicians to follow wholly in the footsteps of the first generation of inventors. As a result, the Greeks took the novel step of adding vowel letters.
It is significant that what the Greeks did was not to make the new vowel signs out of whole cloth, as it were, out of nothing, but that they followed the method which is characteristic of invention in general. They took over the existing system, twisted and stretched it as far as they could, and created outright only when they were forced to. While the Phœnician alphabet lacked vowel signs, the Greeks felt that it had a superfluity of signs for breaths and stops. So they transformed the Semitic breaths and stops into vowels. Thus they satisfied the needs of their language; and incidentally added the capstone to the alphabet. It was the first time that a system of writing had been brought on the complete basis of a letter for every sound. All subsequent European alphabets are merely modifications of the Greek one.
The first of the Semitic letters, the Aleph, stood for the glottal stop, a check or closure of the glottis in which the vocal cords are situated; a sound that occurs, although feebly, between the two o’s in “coördinate” when one articulates distinctly. In the Semitic languages this glottal stop is frequent, vigorous, and etymologically important, wherefore the Semites treated it like any other consonant. The Greeks gave it a new value, that of the vowel A. Similarly they transformed the value of the symbols for two breath sounds, a mild and a harsh H, into short and long E, which they called Epsilon and Eta. Their O is made over from a Semitic guttural letter, while for I the Semitic ambiguous J-I was ready to hand. U, written Y by the Greeks, is a dissimilated variant of F, both being derived from Semitic Vau or the sixth letter with the value of V or U. The vocalic form was now put at the end of the alphabet, which previously had ended with T. Its consonantal double, F, later went out of use in Greek speech and was dropped from the alphabet.