Derived from many, but surpassing all.
Such as that Venus, in whose form was found
The gathered graces of the Virgins round,
The English language shows the magic force
Of blended beauties cull’d from every source.
The Alphabet
“The Egyptian Origin of our Alphabet” was the subject of a paper read before the New York Academy of Sciences by Dr. Charles E. Moldeuke, the Egyptologist. Two large charts on the wall showed in forty parallel columns the evolution of the various letters of the alphabet from the Egyptian hieroglyph through the Phœnician, Hebrew, and Greek to the Latin forms.
The common opinion, said the lecturer, that the Phœnicians invented the alphabet, is entirely unfounded; they merely adopted twenty-two letters from the Egyptians in 600 B.C. and then spread them as their own alphabet through Greece and Italy. The letters we use now go back to Egypt before the time of Moses and have represented practically the sounds in the same order for six thousand years.
Phonetic Changes
No nation keeps the sound of its language unaltered through many centuries; sounds change as well as grammatical forms, though they may endure longer, so that the symbols do not retain their proper values; often, too, several different sounds come to be denoted by the same symbol; and in strictness the alphabet should be changed to correspond to all these changes. But little inconvenience is practically caused by the tacit acceptance of the old symbol to express the new sound; indeed, the change in language is so gradual that the variations in the values of the symbols is imperceptible. It is only when we attempt to reproduce the exact sounds of the English language of less than three centuries ago that we realize the fact that if Shakespeare could now stand on our stage he would seem to us to speak in an unknown tongue; though one of his plays, when written, is as perfectly intelligible now as then.