The Story of the Alphabet

by Edward Clodd

The alphabets derived from the Hellenic are (1) Greek, (2) Russian, (3) Coptic, (4) Latin.

(1) Greek.—To the ancient Greek Hellas meant no defined country, but simply the abode of the Hellenes, whether in Smyrna, Syracuse, Athens, or wherever else they might be found. The mountainous character of Greece explains its division into a crowd of petty states, many of which were no bigger than a modern township. This accorded with Aristotle's view that the area of the state should not be wider than an orator's voice would carry. The physical separation of the peoples explains that political disunion which was the curse of the country from first to last, and accounts for the forty local alphabets which made for discord. But the federation at the time of the Persian invasion, when the victories of Marathon and Salamis fostered conceptions of a common fatherland, was followed by the rise of Athens, and her intellectual supremacy determined that of one of the alphabets. These had settled into two leading groups, the Ionian (in which the Corinthian may be included) and the Chalcidian. The Ionian, which was developed in the famous colony of that name, deviated more from the Phœnician type than the Chalcidian. It was adopted by Athens 483 b.c., and became the classic alphabet of Greece. From it there sprang the Slavonic, Coptic, and other alphabets, while the Chalcidian gave birth to the alphabets of Western Europe.

(2) Russian.—A quaint and probably trustworthy tradition tells how the Greek alphabet was imported into Russia. "Formerly," says John, Exarch of Bulgaria, who wrote in the ninth century, "the Slavonians had no books, but they read and made divinations by means of pictures and figures cut on wood, being pagans. After they had received baptism they were compelled, without any proper rules, to write their Slavonic tongue by means of Greek and Latin letters. But how could they write well in Greek letters such words as Bog, Zhivot, Zelo, or Tserkov, and others like these? And so many years passed by. But then God, loving the human race, had pity on the Slavonians, and sent them St. Constantine, the Philosopher, called Cyril, a just and true man, who made for them an alphabet of thirty-eight letters, of which some were after the Greek style, and some after the Slavonic language." The variety of sounds in Slavonic involved the addition of ten characters to Cyril's alphabet, and although that number was afterwards reduced, the Russian remains the most cumbersome and ungainly of alphabets.

(3) Coptic, or, more correctly, the Coptic script of Egypt under the Romans. Notwithstanding the advent of Cæsar Augustus as Prefect of Egypt, Greek influence prevailed, and the native Christians, in transcribing the Coptic version of the Bible, used the Greek alphabet, borrowing some half-dozen of the ancient Egyptian demotic signs to express sounds unrepresented by the Greek. But, as throughout Mohammedan countries, Arabic has supplanted Coptic, which is now used only for liturgical purposes, "perhaps little if at all understood by the priests who have to use it in the services of the Church."

(4) Latin.—This is, far and away, the most important of all alphabets. As stated above, it is derived from the Chalcidian type of the Hellenic, so called because in use at Chalcis, in Eubœa, an island of the Ægean, whence migrated one of the several Greek colonies planted in Southern Italy. As the oldest Italic scripts—copying the older method of the Greek—read from right to left, and as the first thing aimed at by the colonists would be the use of common sound-signs and numerals, there is good warrant for fixing the date of the introduction of the Greek alphabet into Italy at about the eighth century before Christ. The various derived scripts—Umbrian, Oscan, Etruscan, and others—have all, the Latin alone excepted, passed away. The ultimate dominance of the Latins brought about the abolition of every other alphabet than their own, which, becoming the alphabet of the Roman Empire, and then of Christendom, secured an everlasting supremacy. It was the vehicle of Greek and Roman culture to Western Europe; it is the vehicle of all the culture of the progressive races of the world. Although essentially identical with the Greek, it took its own line, and that, compared with the Slavonic, a simple one. The earliest Indo-European or "Aryan" language contained, so far as can be discovered, twelve consonants and three vowels (i, a, u), and to these last the Latin added e and o. It at first rejected the Greek K, and used C for the sounds of both k and g, but later on added a bar to the lower end of C, converting it into G. Similarly, R is but a variation of P, by the addition of a stroke below the crook. And while the later Greek rejected Q, the Latin retained it. But not to multiply examples, citations of which are confusing in the absence of explanations of the causes necessitating changes of form, explanations too technical for admission here (see for examples Taylor, ii. 140), it may suffice to give a few specimens of variations between the older and newer Latin and Greek forms.

FINAL LATIN AND GREEK FORMS COMPARED WITH THEIR
PROTOTYPES IN THE OLDER ALPHABETS

In the early empire the Romans used two sorts of characters, Capital and Cursive. The Capitals were square-shaped or rustic, i.e. slightly ornamented. They were used for inscriptions and other writing demanding prominence, as we use capitals nowadays, borrowing the old Roman forms. The Cursive or running characters are the originals of our small types, and were used for correspondence and other purposes where rapid writing was an object, abbreviations, which are the forerunners of our modern "shorthand," being sometimes employed. Out of this cursive hand there arose a variety of hand-writings, the most important among these being the Irish "semi-uncial." The appearance of this script in that island is one of the problems of graphiology. "No Irish hand is known out of which it could have arisen. And yet in the sixth century Ireland suddenly becomes the chief school of Western calligraphy, and the so-called Irish uncial blazes forth in full splendour as the most magnificent of all mediæval scripts. Only one conclusion seems possible. Some time in the fifth century a fully-formed, book-hand must have been introduced by St. Patrick (432-458 a.d.), doubtless from Gaul, where he received his consecration. And this must have been cultivated as a calligraphic script in the Irish monasteries, which at this time enjoyed comparative immunity from the ravages of the Teutonic invaders, who, in the fifth century, desolated Italy, Gaul, and Spain." (Taylor, ii. 173.) Irish monks introduced it into Northumbria, and in course of time there was derived from it the "Caroline minuscule," as it is called, because it was introduced in the reign of Charlemagne in the famous school at Tours founded by Alcuin of York, a celebrated scholar of the eighth century, and friend of the Emperor. As a clear hand, compressible into a small space, it grew rapidly in favour till the end of the twelfth century, when a period of decadence, of which the ugly "Black Letter" was the result, set in and held sway in Western Europe for a generation after the discovery of printing with movable types. The Black-letter characters were imitations of the coarse thick characters of the monkish manuscripts, and it was not till the early part of the sixteenth century that they were displaced in England by the Roman letters, whose basis is the Caroline minuscule ([see p.37]). Here, however, we are on the threshold of the "chapel," and must retrace our steps for brief survey of the few changes introduced into the Latin alphabet in adapting it to the requirements of the English language. These are shown in the admirable table borrowed from Canon Taylor. (History of the Alphabet, i. 72.) The order of the letters (an unexplained problem in the history of the alphabet) approximates to that of the Phœnicians, and their names are based on the same principle as that of the Latin. Running our eye down the table we note that our alphabet provides for certain phonetic variations by turning the Latin I into I and J, and VV or UV into double U = W. The Anglo-Saxon, which appears to be partly Roman and partly Irish in origin, had borrowed two useful characters from the Runic, Þ = w, named wen, and Þ = th, named thorn, which for a time formed part of the English alphabet. The thorn has been revived of late, as a bastard archaic, in the printing of the as y^e, with consequent mispronunciation of that word by those who see it thus changed. Both Y and Z were late importations from the Greek into the Latin, being used only in Greek loan-words to denote sounds peculiar to the Greek; hence, as the most recent arrivals, their appearance at the end of the alphabet. Some of our letters are of little use; K makes C superfluous, and Q and X are of no more service to us than they were to the Romans. So that, for practical purposes, we have only twenty-three letters wherewith to indicate at least thirty-two sounds. Thus our alphabet, like our spelling (which is ever at war with our pronunciation, to the bewilderment of school children and foreigners), is what it is from the lack of any consistent rule. Nevertheless, so workable a set of signs has secured a footing which, made firmer by the art of printing, is not likely to be disturbed by any processes of phonetic change which mark the course of speech. To that art of printing is also due those modifications in handwriting which distinguish the penmanship of past and present times. As has been seen, while Germany remained in fetters to the eye-distracting Black letter, we freed ourselves by adoption of the clear Roman type; hence the disappearance, save in legal documents and a few show art-books, of the cramped hand which prevailed down to the sixteenth century. So the handwriting of to-day (good, bad, and indifferent, as the personal equation of each one of us shapes it), which we learned at school through the stages of "pot-hooks and hangers" to the grandest flourishes of copy-book "maxims," is derived from the same source as the printed alphabet.

GENEALOGY OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.