FIG. 32.—Paternoster in Mexican hieroglyphics.
Chinese characters have been adopted by only one people with an agglutinative language, the Japanese, who along with these characters (Mana) use another method of writing (Kana), which is syllabic. The Egyptians, speaking an inflectional language, had, on the contrary, to abandon hieroglyphic writing at an early period in order to pass on to syllabic writing and running characters (hieratic and demotic). It is supposed that from the Egyptian (hieroglyphic and hieratic) writing was derived the alphabet styled the Phœnician, the prototype of most of the alphabets of the world.[167]
FIG. 33.—Ancient Chinese hieroglyphics (top line),
Modern (bottom line).
The direction of the lines in writing is especially determined by the nature of the materials written upon. As long as it is a question of tracing on rocks, monuments, etc., there is no dominant direction, and the signs are disposed, as in the pictograph, at hazard, in any direction whatever. Even the ancient Greeks wrote sometimes from right to left, sometimes from left to right, sometimes in “boustrophedon”—that is to say, alternately, in both directions, as oxen walk during ploughing.
But from the time people began to write on palm leaves, on bits of bark, on tablets, papyrus, paper, it has been found necessary to choose a uniform direction.
The brush of the Chinese determined the direction downwards and from right to left, as for painting. The ancient Syriac estranghelo was also written in the same way, but from left to right; this direction still persists in Mongol writing, which is derived from it, while Arabic had transformed it into horizontal writing from right to left. And to-day certain peoples, for instance the Somalis, yet write Arabic downwards, and read it from right to left, turning over the leaf at 90°. Writing from right to left may have been favoured by the sacred custom of the Arabs placing themselves with their face to the east, the light coming from the right; besides, contrary to what takes place with us, in Arabic writing the paper must be made to move from left to right with the left hand, while the right hand, which writes, remains motionless.[168]
The propagation of the different methods of ancient and modern writing and their adoption by different peoples, are closely bound up with the religion and progress in civilisation of these peoples. Thus the Mussulman world has adopted the Arabic writing; the Buddhists of the north, without distinction of race, hold in great esteem the sacred Thibetan characters, whilst those of the south venerate the Pali writing. The Mongol and Manchu alphabets are remains of the Uighuro-Nestorian influence and of the Syriac writing in Central Asia, as the Javanese alphabet is the remains of the civilising domination of the Hindus in Java. With the expansion of European colonisation the characters of the Latin alphabet become more and more prevalent; in Europe even, they tend to relegate to the second place the other characters (gothic, cyrilic, etc.). At the same time, new modes of writing are coming to the front, the telegraphic alphabet, stenography, precursors of a writing of the future, universal, international, simple, and rapid.