Of these—as living occupants—no trace now remains. Instead thereof, the Hovas of the Vazimber localities pay a superstitious reverence to certain upright stones, the graves of the Vazimbers.
This, in my mind, points towards Africa as the birth place of the Madagascar aborigines; and considering the degree to which the extent of their extermination is evidence of physical inferiority, combined with what has been said concerning the original northward extension of the Hottentots, it is, on the whole, more probable that such aborigines—provided they really existed at all—were of the stock of the Koranas, or Gonaquas, rather than of the Koosas or Bechuanas, i.e. Hottentot rather than Kaffre.
Are all the alphabets, that have ever been used, referable to one single prototype, as their ultimate original, or has the process of analysing a language into its elementary articulations, and expressing these by symbols, been gone through more than once? The answer to this is, partially a measure of the intellectual influence of the Semitic nations. Great would be that influence, even if only the Greeks and Romans had adopted the alphabet of the Phœnicians. How much greater if the world at large had done so.
The doctrine of a single prototype is the most probable. For the present alphabets of Europe the investigation is plain enough—indeed they are all so undeniably of either Greek or Roman origin, that doubt upon the matter is out of the question.
For others, however, the affiliation is less clear; and lest the extent to which many of them differ from each other, as well as from their assumed original, be over-valued, the following principles of criticism are suggested.
1. That considering the undeniable differences in form, order, number, and direction of writing between alphabets so undeniably connected as (say) the Hebrew, and (say) the English, no objections to the doctrine of a common origin is to be taken from mere points of dissimilarity in any of the above-named characters.
2. That, considering the probability that such alphabets as the Hieroglyphic and Arrow-headed are just as likely to be artificial derivations from some simpler ones—either in way of cypher alphabets, or in way that the illuminated letters of the Middle Ages differ from common manuscript—no arguments in favour of their antiquity are to be drawn from their undoubted peculiarity of structure.
3. That an alphabet, however much it may differ from others in the arrangement of the lines and points which form its letters, is not to be considered original if it has been framed within the literary period, and with a knowledge of previous ones—the idea of the analysis of a sentence into words, and of words into elementary articulations, being the really great achievement in the invention of an alphabet, and this, in such cases, not being original.
4. That the question of the affiliation or originality of alphabets be considered not only with a view to the particular alphabet, but with a due recognition of the fact that, taking the world at large, the derivation of one alphabet from another, rather than the repetition of the very remarkable process of the analysis of words, and the symbolization of their articulate elements, is the rule, and that the apparent instances of the reverse are the exceptions.
With these, as preliminaries, we may enumerate the alphabets which most put on the garb of original inventions, and most appear to invalidate the doctrine that alphabetic writing was but once, and once for all, invented.