WONDERS OF THE ALPHABET.

By Henry Eckford.

As I have already told you, men can convey ideas to one another by making various kinds of marks. They can also speak to one another without using spoken words, by means of gestures. Animals likewise gesticulate, though in a much cruder way. You have probably seen deaf-mutes converse, eying one another sharply while their fingers kept fluttering and their features working in a lively play of expression. They were speaking a silent language, which is the motion-language of animals and the signal-language of savages carried to the highest point. Watch in any black berry patch the large brown thrush, the cat-bird, or the chewink. Every motion of the bird as it bustles about, is unconcerned. But let it catch sight of you, or let its eyes fall on snake or hawk or cat, and you will see the difference in its motions. Four-footed wild animals exhibit different emotions, such as anger or alarm, by various movements of the head and limbs.

Among savage nations, like our Indians and the wild tribes of Asia, whose nomadic habits cause their languages to become distinct from one another even when they belong to the same parent stock, and where intercourse is apt to be dangerous on account of feuds, the language of gestures has been wonderfully developed. A Zuñi will signal to an Apache, his enemy, and sustain a very full conversation with him across one of those tremendous canyons which are the marvel of our Southwest. For instance, putting the hand to the cheek and inclining the head means “sleep.” Touching the heart means, “I am sincere.” Thrusting forward the two fingers from the lips, to imitate the forked tongue of the snake, means, “you tell lies.”

The lower orders of people in Italy have always been famous for quickness in making and reading signals, and a Neapolitan is often as expert as an Indian of the plains in the language of signals; in fact, he is smarter, for he will even talk by means of it to one of his kind while a stranger remains unconscious that they are communicating with each other before his face.

Some writers have argued that our letters must have been developed from signs once drawn roughly to indicate gestures made by the human limbs. An ingenious person has proposed an entirely new alphabet, which he considers much quicker and more sensible than our own. It is based on gestures natural to mankind and reduced from those which he considers the most important. But into this and into the endless varieties of short-hand writings and abbreviated writings proposed by inventors in what is called stenography, tachygraphy, and other strange-looking words selected from the Greek dictionary, we can not enter.

By sounds, too, ideas are conveyed between animals and between men. As used by mankind, we call the sounds speech; owing to the gulf that man in his pride wishes to set between himself and beasts, we call the sounds made by animals anything rather than speech. When your dog wags its tail, it uses a sort of gesture language. But when it barks, does it not speak? If you ever saw the great actor Salvini play “Othello,” you will remember that he uses cries, like those of animals, to express rage, grief, or remorse, which are too great to find the measured relief of words. Birds sing their happiness and cry their distress. Between the disconsolate mewing of the cat-bird and its rich song of gladness at sunset, while the mother is safe on the nest, the difference is astonishing; so is the difference between the mellow song of the brown thrush and its squirrel-like bark at the certainty of danger, or its vicious clucking and hissing when its nest is found and touched. Jays have a discordant cry, but also a charming bell-like call note, which sounds rarely in the deep pine forests. Even fish sometimes make voluntary sounds, while the cries of our frogs and toads and insects, which make the wilderness joyous, at times are deafening. Animals, as a rule, have some kind of speech, however rude, however occasional may be its use.

But such marks as animals leave on sand or wood, in grass or bushes, can hardly be called writing by the widest interpretation, for they lack intention. To be sure, when the grizzly bear rears its ugly bulk against a redwood-tree and gashes the loose bark in order to stretch its claws, it leaves a sign behind which some animals, particularly those of its own race and those on which it most preys, undoubtedly can read. But the nearest approach, in an animal, to intentional acts designed to be seen or enjoyed by others, is the decoration of its curious house by the bower-bird of New Guinea. A pair of these birds will build an arbor of twigs and leaves for no apparent purpose except their own amusement, and then decorate it with bright feathers and stones, as if they experienced pleasure in looking at it and wished other birds or creatures to see it. But even this is far from the rudest beginnings of writing.

Man writes from forethought and for the instruction of himself and others. Speech is a gift; writing an invention. Speech we share with the animals. Those parts of speech which we call ejaculations can not be separated from the cries of animals. You may have heard man called the talking animal. Would it not be better to call him the writing animal? His invention of writing separates him more than does articulate speech, from the lower orders of animate beings. No matter now how far back we go, or how far down we dig through the earth’s crust to the layers of soil deposited nobody knows how long ago, wherever we find things fashioned by men, we find pictures that show the groping toward some kind of writing. Now, it is a portrait of a horse carved in outline on a piece of bone; at another time, it is a mammoth attacked by a hunter under cover of a wolf-skin. The difference between the brains of man and the brains of the highest animals is so great that, however we may suspect from other things that there was an age when men were little stronger in wits than the apes, we have as yet no certainty where and when a race of men lived who could not at least draw a picture in outline. The Bushmen, an African nation thought to be the lowest of living men in intellect, are now known to be marvelously expert in drawing. They cover the walls of their caves with well-drawn portraits of wild beasts.

So you see that the alphabet, which you learn at an age so early that you forget its difficulties, is perhaps the most curious and marvelous contrivance that has been produced by the brain of man. It is so old, that its origin is lost in the perspective of the past. To reconstruct its history is extremely difficult. The further back we go, the more confused are the records, and the scantier they become; but those which we find seem to point originally to a great variety of writings. The general history seems to be that of simpler from less simple—simpler pictures from complex pictures, simpler alphabets from alphabets more complex. Then a few chosen alphabets outlived all the rest; and finally one form, in great variation to be sure, rules now throughout a great portion of the whole world.

This, as you have seen, is the alphabet which we share with so many nations of different speech, color, and ancestry. Still, only half satisfied with the derivation of this alphabet, we ask, whence did it come to the Phœnicians? Was it evolved on Egyptian soil? Or did the Phœnicians perfect it from some old syllabary like those which I have already described to you. A syllabary of the ancient Hittites of Palestine has just been discovered and partly made out. Attempts have been made to trace it to the cuneiform picture-writing at Babylon, which also I have told you about; and some have thought it may have been born in India, out of a vanished syllabary, and its origin completely forgotten because of wars and the destruction of monuments. Or perhaps some very early or forgotten emigration of people from Asia into Egypt may have carried with it a crude alphabet, which, after further changes, was carried by another and a seafaring people, the Phœnicians, to the nations about the Mediterranean. One of David’s captains was Uriah the Hittite. More and more is being learned nowadays about the Hittites, or Khetas, a Semitic nation that conquered and held Egypt for many centuries, long before David’s time. It is thought by some that Joseph was sold by his brothers into slavery while the Hittites ruled over the patient Egyptians, who abhorred them and their gods. There seems to have been no difficulty on the part of Joseph and his brothers in making themselves understood by Potiphar and the Pharaoh that sat on the throne. If the ruling class was Semitic at the time, the court speech of the day was doubtless a dialect something like Hebrew, and this explains also why the starving sons of Jacob turned to Egypt for grain. The Hittites are considered the same people as the Khetas, the same also as the Shepherd Kings whom the Egyptians called the Hyksos. Perhaps it was during the reign of the Hyksos, or Hittites, and while the Hebrews were increasing mightily in numbers, and gradually falling under the displeasure of their rulers in Egypt, that the Phœnicians, their seafaring relatives, adapted those twenty-two letters from the great store of signs and symbols accumulated by long lines of Egyptian priests.

You have seen that the origin of the letters of our alphabet has been attributed to many different sources. One has been sought in the signal or gesture language, common to savage man, still used by civilized man under certain circumstances, and not unknown in its most general features to the lower animals. You may remember that the forms of letters have been traced back by some to the shapes of trees, and by others to the shapes of animals. The best reasoned origin of the Phœnician alphabet ascribes it to rude pictures of gods, men, animals, plants, and objects.

A young man came to one of the wisest Jewish Rabbis to be a disciple.

“My son,” asked the Rabbi, “what is your occupation?”

“I am a scribe,” he replied.

“Then,” exclaimed the Rabbi; “be thou conscientious, O my son, for thy work is God-like!”

Many nations have held that their letters were the suddenly inspired inventions of demi-gods; others have maintained that only a god could have given so useful and admirable a thing to man. The divine origin of letters has been asserted in twenty different tongues. You have seen how many different earthly objects have been suggested as the source of letters. A Frenchman named Moreau de Dammartin, a Member of the French Institute, claimed that the letters of the alphabet were derived from the constellations which lie on the path of the earth around the sun; and certain old star-readers believed that they could read men’s characters and destinies by the aid of the constellations from which Dammartin derived the letters of the alphabets. And to-day there are people who claim to read men’s characters from their handwriting alone. As the writing of every nation is distinguished by certain strong national peculiarities, it is easy for an expert to decide to what nation a writer belongs. Having settled that, certain large characteristics which are common to all men, but in different degrees, can be seen in every handwriting. A certain number of men are calm, even-lived, sensible, and practical. Men of that class are almost certain to write plain, round hands in which every letter is distinctly legible; neither very much slanted forward, nor tilted backward; no letter very much bigger than its neighbor, nor with heads much above or tails much below the letters not so distinguished; the letters all having about the same general uprightness, and the lines true to the edges of the paper, neither tending upward nor downward. Exact, business-like people will have an exact handwriting. Fantastic minds revel in quirks and streamers, particularly for the capital letters, and this quality is not infrequent in certain business hands, as if the writers found a relief from the prosaic nature of their work in giving flourishes to certain letters. Firm, decided, downright men are apt to bear on the pen while writing, and to make their strokes hard and thick. On the contrary, people who are not sure of themselves, and are lacking in self-control, press unevenly, and with anxious-looking, scratchy hands. Ambitious people are apt to be overworked; they are always in haste and either forget to cross their t’s, or dot their i’s. They are also apt to run the last few letters of every word into an illegible scrawl. Besides those who do this naturally, there are others, silly or young people, who imitate the illegibleness in the handwriting of some one whom they admire. Flurried, troubled, and conscience-twinged persons have a crabbed and uneven handwriting. From all this it will appear that the claim of those who try to read character from handwritings is not so absurd as some people imagine.

I have now tried to tell you as plainly as possible the main facts about our alphabet so far as its history has been puzzled out. Those who are not afraid of large words, and wish to learn at greater length, should read the articles on the alphabet in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” and also in “Appleton’s Cyclopædia,” and especially the two large volumes called “The Alphabet,” written by Mr. Isaac Taylor. The number of special books and treatises in French, German, and English, bearing on different languages and their alphabets is too great to mention here.

We are taught the alphabet so soon after infancy that we naturally underrate its importance all our lives. Yet, who shall measure its importance to civilization? Writing has enabled mankind to store up knowledge. There are calculations and speculations which require so much straining of the mind, that advance to them and beyond them would have been impossible without the stepping-stones furnished by writing. For calculations, numerals and algebraic letters are the stepping-stones; for speculations, words and frequent sentences. The storing of ideas in books is often badly done, and people are always ready to groan over the vast accumulations of volumes and the very small proportion of ideas worth preserving. Yet, until volumes became general and no longer the mysterious conjuring books of the few, human knowledge was always more or less in danger of being swept from the earth by accidents to the few and scattered libraries. The more widely a book was spread in copies over the world, the less was the chance of its total disappearance. The printing-press aided in this kind of insurance of the knowledge of man against accidents. And neither printing-press nor alphabet need yet be considered as perfected. Our alphabet is not the best ever invented, but it is short and handy. As a subject for study, it yields to nothing that is connected intimately with the civilization of mankind. When we understand the history of the alphabet in all its course, and in all its minor points, we shall know the history of mankind ever since men first began to diverge widely from the beasts of the wood.

THE END.