Mr. W. W. Rockhill, in Am. Anthrop., IV, No. 1, p. 91, notices the work of M. Paul Vial, missionary, etc., De la langue et de l’écriture indigènes au Yûnân, with the following remarks:
Père Vial has published a study upon the undeciphered script of the Lolos of Western China, of which the first specimen was secured some twelve years ago by E. Colborne Baber. Prof. Terrien de Lacouperie endeavored to establish a connection between these curious characters and the old Indian script known as the southern Ashoka alphabet. The present, Père Vial’s, work gives them a much less glorious origin. He says of them: “The native characters were formed without key, without method. It is impossible to decompose them. They are written not with the strokes of a brush, but with straight, curved, round, or angular lines, as the shape chosen for them requires. As the representation could not be perfect, they have stopped at something which can strike the eye or mind—form, motion, passion, a head, a bird’s beak, a mouth, right or left, lightness or heaviness; in short, at that portion of the object delineated which is peculiarly characteristic of it. But all characters are not of this expressive kind; some even have no connection with the idea they express. This anomaly has its reason. The native characters are much less numerous than the words of the language, only about thirty per cent. Instead of increasing the number of ideograms, the Lolos have used one for several words. As a result of this practice the natives have forgotten the original meaning of many of their characters.”
A summary of the original cuneiform characters, numbering one hundred and seventy, gives many of them as recognizable sketches of objects. The foot stands for “go,” the hand for “take,” the legs for “run,” much as in the Egyptian and in the Maya and other American systems. The bow, the arrow, and the sword represent war; the vase, the copper tablet, and the brick represent manufacture; boats, sails, huts, pyramids, and many other objects are used as devices.
W. St. Chad Boscawen (a) says:
Man’s earliest ventures in the art of writing were, as we are well aware, of a purely pictorial nature, and even to this day such a mode of ideography can be seen among some of the Indian tribes. * * * There is no reasonable doubt but that all the principal systems of paleography now in vogue had their origin at some remote period in this pictorial writing. In so primitive a center as Babylonia we should naturally expect to find such a system had been in vogue, and in this we are not disappointed.
Fig. 1087.—Pictographs in alphabets.
Fig. 1087 is presented as a brief exhibit of the pictographs in some inchoate alphabets.