Other methods employed for sending messages are of curious interest as commonly used by people far removed from each other in time and place. [[3]]As the knotted cords of the Chinese, or the quippas of the Peruvians, which by their numbers, the style of knotting, or the distribution in groups, were used as message bearers to all parts of the country. In the same category also are the notched sticks of the North American Indians, the tally sticks of the Danes, the English and other people.
But while in different parts of the world human beings have invented ways of communicating with the absent without the art of writing, to depict an object instead of conveying an object, would result as a simpler and more lasting method of expression.
Thus, in simple pictures of objects, we find the earliest beginnings of the art of writing. How these may be employed as message bearers or for the record of events we have abundant illustration in the picture writings of the North American Indian on the bark of trees, or inscribed on rocks, metal and stone.
In the same way, in rude carvings with flint chips on bone and ivory, records of the chase have come down to us from that far off time when paleolythic man hunted the hairy rhinoceros, the mammoth and the hyena in the forests of Europe.
Though hardly attaining the art of writing, pictorial representations in kind were the earliest human attempt in this mode of expression. Later, when pictures became the symbols of ideas, as the picture of a bee to symbolize royalty, of an eye to indicate seeing or knowing, two legs to signify walking or going, or a sparrow for cruelty or inferiority, we reach a higher stage of progression—relics or reminiscences often of the old gesture language, or objects sent as symbols of ideas.
These two first stages in the development of the art of writing are known as ideograms, where signs, symbols or figures suggest the ideas of objects without expressing their names. To construct a sentence in this way with the various parts of speech, is impossible.
The next advance was phonetism, the representation of the sound of words. Thus, the picture of a lion or a camel will be understood whatever the language of the picture-maker may be. Perhaps, also, symbols for things, as the sun for light, or an eye for seeing. “But how,” says Hereen, “can the names of persons, as Henry, Lewis, and the like, be distinguished by symbolic pictures?”
This is true also of many other words without the adoption of signs or characters to represent sound, or the names of things, any adequate expression of facts or ideas is impossible. It thus came about that when pictures of objects or symbols of ideas obtained a fixed and permanent sign for the sound in any language phonetism began.
Among the confusions which appear at this stage are the homophones; relics of that primitive stage in speech, the monosyllabic, when few sounds were used to express many things. As an example in modern English, we have such words as pair, pare and pear; or rite, write, right and wright; words so like in sound, so unlike in meaning.
In our language, these homophones for the greater part are defined by the variant spelling, but as without an alphabet there could be no variant spelling, other devices were necessary to indicate the various meanings of words having the same sound.