Illustrated history of ancient literature, oriental and classical

by John D. Quackenbos

Turanian Dialects.—Here there is slighter evidence of relationship. The Turanian languages, though they seem to be members of the same original family, differ widely; for those who spoke them were nomads, wanderers over the globe, whose customs, laws, and dialects were modified with every change of habitation and condition. To this sporadic group belong the Mongolian tongues, the Turkish, Finnic, and Hungarian, together with certain Polynesian dialects; but the Chinese, Japanese, Australian, North American Indian, South African, and many others of the nine hundred languages spoken on the earth, bear hardly enough resemblance to these to be classed in the same family.

SYSTEMS OF WRITING.

Language is either spoken or written. Spoken language we find to have been used as a medium of communication between men in the earliest periods to which history carries us back. It is the expression of reason, and as such constitutes a line of demarcation between man and the lower animals. Without it, indeed, the brute can, to a certain extent, make known his emotions and desires. The house-dog, by the distinctive character of his bark, welcomes his master or threatens the intrusive stranger. The hen warns her chicks of danger by one set of signals, and calls them to feed by another. The ant, discovering an inviting grain too heavy for itself alone, bears the intelligence to its fellows and promptly returns with aid. But such limited means of communication fall infinitely short of the perfect system which is exclusively man’s birthright—which uses articulate sounds to represent ideas, and combines them so as to express every shade of thought.

Written Language.—Spoken Language lives only for the moment; words uttered to-day die and are forgotten to-morrow. To give permanency to his passing thoughts, when advancing civilization showed such permanency to be desirable, man devised Writing, the art of representing ideas by visible characters. Written Language is the vehicle of literature—the material in which the thinker embodies his conceptions for future generations, just as the sculptor gives permanent forms to his ideals in marble, or the painter on the glowing canvas.

Writing is either Ideographic or Phonetic. The Ideographic System represents material objects directly, by pictures or symbols. The Phonetic System uses certain characters to express the articulate sounds by which such objects or notions are denoted, and thus indirectly, through the two media of sounds and characters, indicates the objects or notions themselves.

Ideographic Writing.—It has long been contended that the earliest method of conveying ideas was by means of pictorial images, and there is no reason for disputing such a theory. But this is not written language; it is mere thought-painting, or the representation of objects and actions by pictures, and may satisfy the wants of primitive races in conveying a limited amount of information. Thus the American Indians informed one another of the presence and movements of troops, or of engagements that had taken place, by means of pictures. The emblems employed were generally understood among the different tribes: e.g., a tree with human legs stood for a botanist; and the figure of a man with two bars on the stomach and four across the legs, was a prescription ordering abstinence from food for two days, and rest for four. The original characters of the Egyptians and Chinese, of the cuneiform systems, and of the Aztecs, were, in like manner, mere pictures, and nothing more.

The test of a written language is its ability to express abstract thoughts by single signs or combinations of signs; in this direction, rude symbols are found utterly wanting. It may be that picture-drawing gave the first impulse to the invention of phonetic writing; yet the origin of such writing, with its gradual development, is as hidden from us as that of language itself. We are justified, however, in assuming that wherever we have history, we have also written language.

Phonetic Writing.—There are two systems of phonetic writing, the Syllabic and the Alphabetic. The characters of the former are used to represent syllables, or combinations of sounds (either words or parts of words) uttered by distinct impulses of the voice; those of the latter represent the elements of which these syllables are composed, or letters. History indicates that written language is always phonetic. In Egypt it is both syllabic and alphabetic; in Babylon, syllabic alone.

The characters by which the elementary sounds of any language are denoted, arranged in order, constitute its Alphabet. A perfect alphabet would be one in which every letter represented but one simple sound, and every simple sound was represented by but one letter—a perfection never yet attained.

It is to the Egyptians that the world is indebted for Alphabetic Writing. Their hieroglyphics were partly alphabetic, partly syllabic, and partly determinative, the latter, in the course of centuries, becoming word-signs or ideograms (see p. 120). From a modification of their alphabet employed by them in transliterating Semitic words and names, the Phœnician alphabet was derived. This modified alphabet, including several syllabic signs, consisted of about thirty characters. It has been conjectured that Phœnicians, dwelling or trading in Egypt, saw the advantage of written language, and employed this transliteration alphabet to write their own tongue. All the modifications introduced by them are graphic in nature, and designed to simplify the original characters. It is further important to note that the Phœnician alphabet is not derived from the hieroglyphics, but from the second form of the hieratic (see p. 122, and table, p. 87, where the theory is illustrated). The Hittite hieroglyphics (p. 114) may be derived from the Egyptian; but other ancient Oriental alphabets, as the Babylonian, the Chinese, and perhaps the Sanscrit, were possibly independently invented and developed.