The stages through which alphabetic writing has passed are as follow:—
- 1. Pictographs.—Pictures or actual representations of objects.
- 2. Ideograms.—Pictorial symbols, which are used to suggest objects or abstract ideas.
- Phonograms.—Graphic symbols of sounds. They have usually arisen out of conventionalised ideograms, which have been taken to represent sounds instead of things.
- 3. (A.) Verbal signs, representing entire words.
- 4. (B.) Syllabic signs which stand for the articulations of which words are composed.
- 5. Alphabetic Signs or Letters, which represent the elementary sounds into which the syllable can be resolved.
1. The least advanced of men can convey information, that is, they can write by means of Pictographs.
2. Probably all of them also employ more or fewer symbols or Ideograms, such as the depicting of a turtle for “land” by the North American Indians.
The next stage is that in which from pictures which represent things or ideas were derived pictures which represent sounds or Phonograms.
Our children, of their own initiative, to amuse themselves, pass through the two earlier stages of writing. The stage we are now considering is a common amusement for children, in the kind of conundrum known as the rebus. “In the rebus the picture of an object is taken to denote any word or part of a word which has the same sound as the name of the thing pictured. As in the well-known rebus in which the sentence, ‘I saw a boy swallow a gooseberry,’ is represented by pictures of an eye, a saw, a boy, a swallow, a goose, and a berry. If, for instance, like the ancient Egyptians, we were to adopt a circle with a central dot as our ordinary written symbol for the sun, this would be an ideogram. But if we were to go on, and after the Egyptian or Chinese method, were to use the same symbol to express also the word ‘son,’ we should have a phonogram of that primitive type which has repeatedly served to bridge over the gap between picture ideograms and phonetic characters.”
3. In all languages there are certain monosyllabic words which are pronounced alike, but which have different significations, for example, stork, stalk (noun and verb). In order to indicate which was intended in phonography, it would be necessary to add a determinative or explanatory ideogram. Thus, if a figure of the bird represented the first, the same figure of a bird with a flower or some leaves by its side would indicate a stalk, and a pair of legs by the side of another bird would determinate the action of stalking. The Chinese to the present day write in this cumbrous way, as used to do the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians.
There is no need, however, to invent a rebus to show what one is when Egyptian hieroglyphics are full of them. I take the following from Dr. Isaac Taylor. The picture of a lute was used symbolically by the Egyptian scribes to denote “excellence.” It then came to stand as a phonogram to express the word nefer, “good.” But in the Egyptian language this sound represented two homophonic [similarly pronounced] words, nefer, “good,” and nefer, “as far as.” Hence we find that the character may be used as a pictorial ideogram [pictograph] to represent a lute, and as a symbolic ideogram to mean excellence; then as a phonogram for the preposition nefer, and lastly as a syllabic sign to denote ne, the first syllable of the word nefer.
4. The problem of phonetic denotation having thus been solved, the syllabic signs were combined so as to form compound phonograms on the principle of the rebus. For example, the name of lapis lazuli was khesteb. Now the word khesf meant to “stop,” and the syllable teb denoted a “pig.” Hence the rebus “stop-pig” was invented to express graphically the name of lapis lazuli, and this is figured by the picture of a man stopping a pig by pulling at its tail.
The Japanese system of writing illustrates the later development. They learnt the art of writing from the Chinese, but as their language is polysyllabic, while the Chinese is essentially monosyllabic, “the Chinese characters which are verbal phonograms could only be used for the expression of the polysyllabic Japanese words by being treated as syllabic signs. A number of characters sufficient to constitute a syllabary having been selected from the numerous Chinese verbal phonograms, it was found that the whole apparatus of determinatives (or ‘keys,’ radicals, or ‘primitives,’ as they are termed in describing Chinese writing) might be rejected, being no longer indispensable to the reader. By these two changes an almost incredible simplification of the Chinese writing was effected. But though syllabism is a great advance on a system of verbal phonograms, yet it is necessarily somewhat cumbrous, owing to the considerable number of characters which are required.”