Logotheti

“ That was enough. Baraka had certainly been in the lodgings and had probably left in them everything that belonged to her disguise. The fact that the gloves and the stick were in the hall, looked very much as if she had come in dressed as a man and had left them there when she had gone away in woman's attire. That she was with Logotheti, most probably on his yacht, Lady Maud had not the least doubt, as she went down the stairs. ”

“ As he had anticipated, Baraka was much more impressed {264} by the importance of the words she did not understand than if she had bound herself by any oath familiar to her.
'I am sorry,' she said, 'but what is done is done, and you would have it so.'
She pressed her hand gently to her left side and felt the long steel bodkin, and sighed regretfully.
'You have sworn an oath that no man would dare to break,' said Logotheti solemnly. 'A man would rather kill pigs on the graves of his father and his mother than break it.'
'I shall keep my word. ”

“ In fact the collocation of capital letters and other logograms, without space, is a beautiful feature of the art. We will explain:
"All the consonants of the English alphabet, when written as CAPITALS, are logograms or word-signs that require no space before or after. Four letters, G, J, Q, X, (being of less frequent use) , are also used for affixes besides being word-signs. The capital letter B invariably stands for be, by, but; C stands for say, sea, see. It can never mean anything else. D is used to express day, die, do; F is the word-sign for of, if. off; G stands for God, go, age. ”

“ Recollect that the foreigner is in the same predicament with respect to all the words in the language; and for this reason—the letters in our alphabet have no fixed sounds attached to them, nor is the same sound invariably represented by the same combination of letters. Now what we plead for is, some system of printing and writing, in which the same sound has always the same symbol, and the same symbol has always the same sound; and this we call, when printed, Phonotypy, from "fɷnɩ," voice, and "tɩpos," type ”

“ Just so, those who seek to reproduce the sounds of a language from written symbols, will be tempted to substitute similar sounds with which they are familiar for the sounds of the sketch, as, for our purpose, we may call the alphabet. Even in the case of a foreign language possessing an alphabet in some respects identical with our own, like the French, it is considered necessary to prefix to the alphabet a description of the sound intended to be conveyed by the symbol ”

“ My father and Lovell have been out almost every day, when there are no robbers to be committed to jail, at the Logograph. [1] This is the new name instead of the Telegraph, because of its allusion to the logographic printing press, which prints words instead of letters. Phaenologue was thought of, but Logograph sounds better. My father will allow me to manufacture an essay on the Logograph, he furnishing the solid materials and I spinning them. ”

“ Truly has it been said that “The history of our alphabet is the golden thread which entwines itself with the long story of man’s civilization;” that “It is the greatest triumph of the human mind;” and again, as “The most wonderful of intellectual achievements.” For we are coming to know that letters are an invention, not spontaneous productions or miracles of language, and that evolution, as in other directions of human inquiry, has much to say upon their origin and history. ”

“ There are few things more irritating [pg 136] than to find the alphabet confused by the union of the vowel i with the consonant j, or the vowel u with the consonant v. No doubt they were not distinguished some centuries ago, but this is no reason why they should again be confused now that they are usually distinct. There may be special reasons why they should be mixed together in the British Museum Catalogue, but it is not evident that these are sufficient.
The only safe rule is to use the English alphabet as it is to-day in an English index. ”

“ No doubt the practical man does not want the alphabet required by the phonologist, who must denote every shade of sound and have separate symbols for the sounds heard not in English only, but in other languages as well, but the alphabet of the practical man should be based on that of the phonologist. The reformed alphabet should be one which would enable the child or the foreigner to recognize at once the sound of the word he is reading, and the philologist to determine the pronunciation of the writer. ”

“ Generally, however, we find that the same sign of any particular alphabet has 368 to serve for more than one sound, and it almost invariably happens that we augment the confusion by employing different signs for one and the same sound. The chief reason for these defects is because most nations, instead of creating symbols to represent the sounds in their own language, have been content to adopt an alphabet ready to hand, made to suit the requirements of the language of another nation. ”

“ One single letter gave it to me.”
“How was that?”
“If you will look at the telegram,” said Ben, spreading it out before me, “you will notice that in one instance only is a single letter seen standing by itself. That is the letter ‘b,’ which I concluded must stand for the article ‘a,’ for I know of no other, unless it is ‘I.’ Now, the letter ‘b’ is the second one in the alphabet, and stands next in order to ‘a.’ If this system is followed throughout the cipher, we have only to take, instead of the letters as written, the next in order as they occur in the alphabet. ”

“ There is at the same time the special doctrine of the λόγος σπερματικός, the seminal Logos, or the law of generation in the world, the principle of the active reason working in dead matter. This parts into λόγοι σπερματικοί, which are akin, not to the Platonic ideas, but rather to the λόγοι ἔνυλοι of Aristotle. In man, too, there is a Logos which is his characteristic possession, and which is ἐνδιάθετος, as long as it is a thought resident within his breast, but προφορικός when it is expressed as a word. ”

“ Those who fear that if phonetics is taught in the schools it will then follow that our books will be commonly printed in phonetic symbols, should read Dr. Henry Bradley’s lecture to the British Academy ‘On the relations between spoken and written language’ (1913) , and they will see that the Society’s Tract II, on ‘English Homophones’, illustrates the unpractical nature of any scheme either of pure phonetics in the printing of English books, or even of such a scheme as is offered by ‘the Simplified Spelling Society’ ”

“ While speech and mode of writing are distinct and independent, the one of the other, the influence of language structure in the evolution of graphic systems is conspicuous. Thus a sentence of English speech might be expressed by Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the Tel Armana tablets, more than one language appears in the cuneiform. We have seen how the so called Hittite characters were found on occasion yielding Greek words, and the use of the Roman alphabet for French, German, Italian and other languages, are every day examples. ”

“ The student will do well however to stick to the plain alphabet until the various letters are thoroughly mastered.
Among printers, this alphabet is known as “Gothic,” and some showcard men call it a “block” letter. The term “block” comes from the fact that most of the letters should occupy the same amount of spacing.
While not a beautiful alphabet—it comes in very conveniently, and is a splendid letter for making bold lines. As an illustration—the word “HATS” is a comparatively weak word on a large show card, unless the lettering is heavy, or embellished with some shading or outlining. ”

“ They got rid of surplus signs, of the lumber of determinatives and the like, and invented an alphabet which if it was not perfect (as no alphabet can be, because the letters are not revised from time to time to represent changes in sound) , was of such signal value as to have been accepted by the civilised world of the past, and to have secured, with but slight modifications, a permanence assured to no other invention of the human race. Therefore, the debt that we owe these old traders is in nowise lessened because the current theory of derivation of our alphabet is doubted. ”

“ But in this essay I am contemplating man as he was before hundreds of generations of speaking ancestors had evolved such cerebral powers.
I begin with some observations on the phonetic elements. These are no other than what we call the alphabet, the simple sounds which combined together make up the words of a language. In all European tongues, the mere letters of the alphabet, by themselves, have no meaning and convey no idea; furthermore, their value in a word is fixed; and, thirdly, arranged in a word, they are sufficient to convey its sound and sense to one acquainted with their values. ”

“ Chinese is the official script of Corea, but the lower classes use a phonetic alphabet which, in the judgment of some authorities, is derived from a cursive form of the Nâgari script of India, having, so it is thought, been introduced by Buddhist teachers. Both past and present times afford striking examples of the influence of religion in the diffusion of alphabets, missionaries obviously making use of their own alphabet in the translation of their sacred books into the language of their converts. ”

“ Palæography, or the decipherment of documents, and Epigraphy, or the decipherment of inscriptions, have been indispensable keys to the history of the alphabet. But the materials with which each has to deal would demand a volume, and, moreover, reference to them here has warrant only in their immediate bearings on the development and diffusion of alphabets. But, as with the Papyrus Prisse and the [Pg 200] Book of the Dead, there is a deep interest attaching to some of the venerable records. They are, in the modern phrase, and in the best sense of it, "human documents." ”

“ Logos grew to mean the inward constitution as well as the outward form of thought, and consequently became the expression of exact thought,—which is exact because it corresponds to universal and unchanging principles,—and reached its highest exaltation in becoming not only the reason in man, but the reason in the universe,—the Divine Logos, the thought of God, the Son of God, God himself. ”

“ An explanation of Logos in Greek philosophy is much simpler than is commonly supposed. It is only needful not to forget that for the Greeks thought and word were inseparable, and that the same term, namely, Logos, expressed both, though they distinguished the inner from the outer Logos. It is one of the most remarkable aberrations of the [pg 020] human mind, to imagine that there could be a word without thought or a thought without word. ”

“ Call the alphabet on page 1 of the child’s book the keys of a typewriter. Have the children spell words, touching the letters as the letter keys. Dictate as follows: “Write at on your typewriter.” The pupils touch a and t as they spell aloud. Then dictate cat, bat, hat. Use phonetic words or words made of letters near together in the alphabet. The object of the exercise is to find quickly the place of each letter in the alphabet, as well as to give the ability to quickly recognize the letters. ”

“ The introduction of printing is a powerful aid to the extension of a common language. Thanks to the invention of printing, a written record can quickly be communicated to a large linguistic area in the shape given to it by the author, and an impulse is likewise given to studying what is presented to readers in such an attractive and commodious guise. But it is necessary that the alphabet employed should be identical for all the people in the linguistic area in question; and, of course, the language expressed by that alphabet must be widely understood over that area. ”

“ This character of the Logos as thought and word, at once capable of distinction and yet undifferentiated and inseparable, is of the highest importance for Christian speculation; without an exact comprehension of it, we shall see that the relation of the Son to the Father as we find it explained by Clement and other fathers of the church, remains dark and misty. We have no concept without a word, and philology has shown us how every word, even the most concrete, is based on a concept. ”

“ That is to suit the Alphabet to the Utterances of the Language.’ He announces that ‘care is taken to give every character one power of its own, in which no other character is allowed to interfere.’ He pointed out the defects and inconsistencies of our ordinary orthography, and sought by means of a simpler alphabet and a new vowel scale to place the spelling of the language on a strictly phonetic basis. ”

“ They have bestowed on us an alphabet as practically effective, and as suited to the capabilities of human vision, as any that could have been devised. This alphabet of ours is like an Englishman's dress—plain and manageable; not very artistically arranged, it may be, nor remarkable for copiousness or flow of outline, but sufficiently elastic and capable of extension. ”

“ It assumes that the Logos idea is familiar in Christian theology, and vividly summarizes the main features of the Philonic conception—the eternal existence of the Logos, its relation to God (πρὸς τὸν θεόν, yet distinct) , its creative, illuminative and redemptive activity. But the adaptation of the idea to John’s account of a historical person involved at least three profound modifications:— (1) the Logos, instead of the abstraction or semi-personification of Philo, becomes fully personified. ”

“ Wilberforce, with all a sister's care, had rocked in his baby-cradle,—whom, but for my wife's long and short notes, I should have clumsily abused among the other statesmen of the day.
You will see, in an instant, awakening Reader, that it is not the business simply of "operators" in telegraphic dens to know this Morse alphabet, but your business, and that of every man and woman. If our school committees understood the times, it would be taught, even before phonography or physiology, at school. I believe both these sciences now precede the old English alphabet. ”