Runic alphabet

“ Whereas in the Egyptian, the Babylonian, the Mexican and the Chinese Cultures the formation of a script begins in the very twilight of dawn, whereas the Germans made themselves a Runic alphabet and presently developed that respect for writing as such which led to the successive refinements of ornamental calligraphy, the Classical primitives were entirely ignorant of the numerous alphabets that were current in the South and the East. ”

“ It is remarkable, however, that two of the three runic alphabets from which our knowledge of the whole range of rune-literature is founded, were discovered outside Scandinavia. These three alphabets exist, the first on a thin gold bractea found in 1774 at Vadstena, in Sweden ”

“ 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. ”

“ The various derived scripts—Umbrian, Oscan, Etruscan, and others—have all, the Latin alone excepted, passed away. The ultimate dominance of the Latins brought about the abolition of every [Pg 217] other alphabet than their own, which, becoming the alphabet of the Roman Empire, and then of Christendom, secured an everlasting supremacy. It was the vehicle of Greek and Roman culture to Western Europe; it is the vehicle of all the culture of the progressive races of the world. Although essentially identical with the Greek, it took its own line, and that, compared with the Slavonic, a simple one. ”

“ Again, the clew given by the Coptic to the sounds of the old Egyptian, was also afforded by the ancient Zend, the sacred language of the Parsees.
Notwithstanding the fact that alphabetic signs were the key to each of these systems of writing, we are not to find that either the hieroglyphic or cuneiform systems were founded on the alphabet. We are to find that alphabetism and a pure alphabet are not identical. We are also to find that before the simplicities of an alphabet are reached; the art of writing in all systems is a series of bewildering complications. ”

“ Our modern alphabet is not a very satisfactory instrument for the purpose of reproducing our speech. Some day a genius will invent a new system of writing which shall give each one of our sounds a little picture of its own. But with all its many imperfections the letters of our modern alphabet perform their daily task quite nicely and fully as well as their very accurate and precise cousins, the numerals, who wandered into Europe from distant India, almost ten centuries after the first invasion of the alphabet. ”

“ So a great quarrel sprang up between the different countries as to which Alphabet should be used, the Roman or the Gothic. In Italy a man called Manutius tried to settle the quarrel by making a letter which all the printers would use and he called his style of lettering the Italic. The printers who used the Gothic and Roman letters also used these Italic letters, but were not willing to give up their own style and use the Italic entirely.
We are so used to seeing and using the Alphabet today that we never ask ourselves how the letters came to look the way they do now. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the readiness of these for new combinations, their varied adjustments and readjustments in the formation of words, we find the life and growth, and practically unlimited expansion of language; the rhythmical melodies of verse; those inherent powers which render them so adaptive to the wants of man; and withal, so easy to be acquired. Yet writing without an alphabet is quite possible. In fact, the history of the past is revealing great nations and people in possession of systems of writing and of extensive literature, not founded on an alphabet. ”

“ The honesty of these writers is unimpeachable, however much their competency may be questioned; and no slight confirmation of their testimony appears, in the judgment of many modern scholars, to be furnished by the correspondence in number, name (the sibilants s and z excepted) , and order, although not in form, between the letters of the Greek and the Semitic alphabets. "In default of further evidence, the very word Alphabet," Canon Taylor remarks, "might suffice to disclose the secret of its origin. ”

“ Every man of common reading knows that a living language must necessarily suffer gradual changes in its current words, in the significations of many words, and in pronunciation. The unavoidable consequence then of fixing the orthography of a living language, is to destroy the the use of the alphabet. This effect has, in a degree, already taken place in our language; and letters, the most useful invention that ever blessed mankind, have lost and continue to lose a part of their value, by no longer being the representatives of the sounds originally annexed to them. ”

“ From these names alone, then, even if nothing else were known about the early alphabets, it would be possible to prove the correctness of the Greek legend that they derived their letters from the Phœnicians. A people who themselves invented an alphabet would obviously name the letters with words in their own language, and not with meaningless syllables taken from a foreign speech. ”

“ Further, the alphabets in use are, even the best of them, imperfect. It is plain that, when the members of a particular linguistic community, like, e.g., the Germans or the Portuguese, seek to make their alphabet a consistent picture of the sounds of speech, they aim merely at representing the sounds of their own language. ”

“ The early hieratic writing was traced on papyrus with a soft reed-stump, while the Semitic was cut upon a stone with a chisel, to the loss of flowing lines and curves. "Looking broadly at the two scripts, Hieratic and Moabite, we see in the first place that the Semitic writing is distinguished by greater symmetry and greater simplicity. The letters have become more regular and uniform: more angular, more firm, and more erect; the differences in relative size have diminished; the complicated and difficult characters especially being straightened or curtailed." (History of the Alphabet, i. 125.) ”

“ The latter are believed to have made no nearer advance towards writing than the tying of tally-knots on strings, and the Mexicans, while they had invented paper, wrote down their ideas, save in the cases of a few phonetic signs, as children would, by means [Pg 76] of pictures; but the Mayas, like the Egyptians, had proceeded beyond pictures to hieroglyphs, where symbols, more or less arbitrary, stand for words or syllables, and the mind prepares itself to invent an alphabet." (Mercer's Hill Caves of Yucatan, p. 73.) ”

“ It is clear, for example, that, in the interest of explicitness, we should have a separate symbol for the vowel sound in each of the following syllables: bar, bay, bann, ball, to cite a single illustration.
There is, to be sure, a seemingly valid reason for not extending our alphabet, in the fact that in multiplying syllables it would be difficult to select characters at once easy to make and unambiguous. Moreover, the conservatives might point out, with telling effect, that the present alphabet has proved admirably effective for about three thousand years. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Please to understand, then, ignorant Reader, that this curious alphabet reduces all the complex machinery of Cadmus and the rest of the writing-masters to characters as simple as can be made by a dot, a space, and a line, variously combined. Thus, the marks .— designate the letter A. The marks —... designate the letter B. All the other letters are designated in as simple a manner.
Now I am stripping myself of one of the private comforts of my life, (but what will one not do for mankind?) when I explain that this simple alphabet need not be confined to electrical signals. ”

“ In taking the Phœnician letters, the Greeks dropped some, used others for slightly different sounds, and added a few to express sounds that were important to them or that did not exist in the Phœnician. But this was done very gradually. It never has been easy to induce people to change and improve their alphabets.
But there is another reason why men have refused to change the order of letters by inserting a new and useful letter in the place where it naturally belonged. The Greeks and many other peoples used the letters of the alphabet for numerals. ”

“ But, whatever its defects, the existing alphabet is a marvellous piece of mechanism, the result of thousands of years of intellectual effort. It is, perhaps without exception, the most stupendous invention of the human intellect within historical times—an achievement taking rank with such great prehistoric discoveries as the use of articulate speech, the making of a fire, and the invention of stone implements, of the wheel and axle, and of picture-writing. It made possible for the first time that education of the masses upon which all later progress of civilization was so largely to depend. ”

“ One of the most marvellous inventions for the advancement of mankind is the phonetic alphabet, or a system of signs representing the sounds of human speech. Without it our present civilization could scarcely have been possible.
No solution of the origin of our European alphabet has yet been obtained: we can trace it back from nation to nation, and form to form, until we reach the Egyptians, and the archaic forms of the Phœnicians, Hebrews, and Cushites, but beyond this the light fails us. ”

“ They are, however, in one sense, hieroglyphics, being tolerably accurate delineations of men, animals, and instruments. If we are right in our conjectures, the value of the Rosetta stone is incomparably greater than has been imagined. We have no need of hieroglyphics: Roman and Egyptian monuments are full of them. But a primitive alphabet, probably the earliest ever formed in the world, and illustrating an important link in the history of writing,—the adaptation of signs to words,—is certainly a discovery very interesting to any philosophical mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although your MS. is the first in these characters that I have ever seen, yet I recognized it at once as a MS. written, or, I should more correctly say, graven, in Burmese, the native language of the kingdom of Ava, and the language also which is used by all persons of cultivation in the dependent provinces of that kingdom. I was enabled to recognize the form of the characters from having once seen the alphabet, which was printed by the Propaganda, first in 1776, and again in 1787. ”

“ The only consonant-symbols that require special notice are the following:—
All the systems of phonetic notation hitherto considered are based on the Roman alphabet. But although the Roman alphabet has many advantages from a practical point of view, it is evidently impossible to build up a consistent and systematic notation on such an inadequate foundation of arbitrary signs. What is wanted, for scientific purposes especially, is a notation independent of the Roman alphabet, built up systematically—an alphabet in which there is a definite relation between sound and symbol. ”

“ Carnegie to reform the alphabet, and we'll pray for him --if he'll take the risk. If we had adequate, competent vowels, with a system of accents, giving to each vowel its own soul and value, so every shade of that vowel would be shown in its accent, there is not a word in any tongue that we could not spell accurately. That would be competent, adequate, simplified spelling, in contrast to the clipping, the hair punching, the carbuncles, and the cancers which go by the name of simplified spelling. ”

“ If we reject M. de Rougé's explanation of the origin of the alphabet, there is practically no rival theory on which to fall back. There are only three other possible sources, none of which can, at present, be regarded in any higher light than as a mere guess. If the Semitic letters were not derived from Egypt they must have been invented by the Phœnicians, or they must have been developed either out of the Hittite hieroglyphics, or out of one of the cuneiform syllabaries. ”