Alphabet

“ Knowing that all that has ever been written or spoken, in all languages, is but the combination of a few sounds transferred to the alphabet of twenty-four letters, or even less, are we not lost in the contemplation of the possibilities of the myriads of facts, in their interchangings, combinations, and wonderful dove-tailings? ”

“ For the alphabet has, in our time, come to its own. We go through life muttering an interminable and incomprehensible jargon of initials. We tack initials on to our names—fore and aft—and we like to see every one of them in its place. ”

“ The Alphabet.—​As for his letters, the child usually teaches himself. He has his box of ivory letters, and picks out p for pudding, b for blackbird, h for horse, big and little, and knows them both. But the learning of the alphabet should be made a means of cultivating the child’s observation: he should be made to see what he looks at. Make big B in the air, and let him name it; then let him make round O, and crooked S, and T for Tommy, and you name the letters as the little finger forms them with unsteady strokes in the air. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And it is this kind of good which must reconcile us to life, and not any answer to the question, 'What would the universe have been without me?' The point one has to care for is, 'Are A, B, and C the better for me?' And there are several letters of the alphabet that could not have easily spared you in the past, and that can still less spare you in the present. ”

“ THE STORY OF THE ALPHABET CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY
"What is ever seen is never seen," and it may be questioned if one in ten thousand of the readers of to-day ever pauses to ask what is the history of the conventional signs called the Alphabet, which, in their varying changes of position, make up the symbols of the hundred thousand words and more contained in a comprehensive dictionary of the English tongue. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By the word alphabet, derived from the Greek names for the first two letters—alpha and beta—of the Greek alphabet, is meant a series of conventional symbols each indicating a single sound or combination of sounds. The ideal alphabet would indicate one sound by one symbol, and not more than one sound by the same symbol. ”

“ The true alphabet for beginners lies in the contracted words, whose missing portions must be supplied by the reader from the few letters given, which are often not even one connected syllable, but instead merely one or two letters out of the missing syllable clustered together.
The reason for this style of writing was to save time and material. With use, it grew into a complete system, a language of its own. At the time it was penned, these contractions were no doubt perfectly familiar to all, just as our modern abbreviations are. ”

“ What word is there of five letters, that, by taking two away, leaves but one? Stone.
What word of one syllable, if you take two letters from it, remains a word of two syllables? Plague; ague.
Why is the letter E a gloomy and discontented vowel? Because, though never out of health and pocket, it never appears in spirits.
Why are the fourteenth and fifteenth letters of the alphabet of more importance than the others? Because we cannot get ON well without them. ”

“ It is much to be lamented, that the alphabet, which has produced and preserved almost all the improvements in other arts and sciences, should have itself received no improvement in modern times; which have added so much elucidation to almost every branch of knowledge, that can meliorate the condition of humanity. Thus in our present alphabets many letters are redundant, others are wanted; some simple articulate sounds have two letters to suggest them; and in other instances two articulate sounds are suggested by one letter. ”

“ The illimitable range of this alphabet, however, is not half disclosed when this has been said. Most articulate language addresses itself to one sense, or at most to two, sight and sound. I see, as I write, that the particular illustrations I have given are all of them confined to signals seen or signals heard. But the dot-and-line alphabet, in the few years of its history, has already shown that it is not restricted to these two senses, but makes itself intelligible to all. Its message, of course, is heard as well as read. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In reality, this appears only when the signs employed represent the sounds of the language. After reaching this point, writing again presents two very different stages. Each syllable may have its particular character; or, better still, the elements of the syllable may be represented. This last form constitutes writing, properly speaking. It is this that we employ. The collection of signs we call an alphabet; and this alphabet, which constitutes the first step of elementary instruction, is certainly one of the most marvelous inventions of the human mind. ”

“ Every one who writes a letter, owes his alphabet to the Romans and Greeks; the Greeks owed their alphabet to the Phoenicians, and the Phoenicians learnt it in Egypt. It may be a very imperfect alphabet as all the students of phonetics will tell you ”

“ That was the birth of the Alphabet, one of the greatest and most momentous triumphs of the human mind. The earliest phonograms represented syllables, not individual letters, the distinguishing signs for vowels and consonants being of yet later introduction; in fact, some alphabets, notably the Hebrew and other Semitic, have no true vowels, but only distinguishing marks, diacritical points as they are called, to denote them. To recapitulate, we have 1, picture-writing; 2, ideograms ”

“ 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. ”

“ Indeed, the invention of letters and their various combinations in forming words, amounting, it is computed, to 620,448,401,733,239,439,360,000, without repeating any combination capable of being made from so small a number of letters as that now comprising our alphabet, has something so extremely ingenious and surprising in its application, that most men who have treated the subject, can hardly forbear attributing it to a divine original. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ Now, to proceed with Orthography, we may remark, that
A letter is the least part of a word.
Of a comic letter an instance has already been given.
Dr. Johnson’s letter to Lord Chesterfield is a capital letter.
The letters of the Alphabet are the representatives of articulate sounds.
The Alphabet is a Republic of Letters.
There are many things in this world erroneously as well as vulgarly compared to “bricks.” In the case of the letters of the Alphabet, however, the comparison is just; they constitute the fabric of a language, and grammar is the mortar. ”

“ Such is the general view of the additions, ejections, changes of power, and changes of order in the English alphabet. The extent, however, to which an alphabet is faulty, is no measure of the extent to which an orthography is faulty; since an insufficient alphabet may, by consistency in its application, be more useful than a full and perfect alphabet unsteadily applied.
§ 174. One of our orthographical expedients, viz., the reduplication of the consonant following, to express the shortness (dependence) of the preceding vowel, is as old as the classical languages: terra, θάλασσα. ”

“ One thing strikes me at once, and that is that in this paragraph all the letters of the alphabet are not used. That is very strange. If we take up a book and open it by chance it will be very seldom that we shall hit upon two hundred and seventy-six letters without all the signs of the alphabet figuring among them. ”

“ Vowels.
What letter in the alphabet is necessary to make a shoe? The last.
What word of six letters admits of five successive elisions, leaving at each abbreviation a well-known word? Brandy—brand—bran—ran—an—a.
Name two English words, one of which, being of one syllable only, shall contain more letters than the other of five syllables? Strength—Ideality.
Why is a glass-blower the most likely person to set the alphabet off at a gallop? Because he can make a D-canter. ”

“ In the process of phonetic change, whose tendency is always toward the increase of the spoken alphabet, the filling up of the system of articulated sounds by the distinction of slighter and more nicely differentiated shades of articulation, our spoken alphabet has very notably outgrown the limits of our written alphabet. ”

“ The following sentence of only 48 letters, contains every letter of the alphabet:—John P. Brady, give me a black walnut box of quite a small size.
The stanza subjoined is a specimen of both lipogrammatic and pangrammatic ingenuity, containing every letter of the alphabet except e. Those who remember that e is the most indispensable letter, being much more frequently used than any other, [1] will perceive the difficulty of such composition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Plates used by permission of Ely & Walker Dry Goods Co., St. Louis.
[28]
“SPECIAL” ALPHABET
This alphabet is a Variation of the Roman and Old English combined. There is always a demand for something neat, and attractive, and not too difficult or “fancy” to be easily made and easily read.
The same alphabet used week after week becomes monotonous, and students will find the “special” alphabet shown on the following page a very interesting one.
The capitals are quite easy, and follow somewhat after the style of the plain, single stroke Roman, for the pen and brush, shown previously. ”

“ We are nevertheless to find that writing without an alphabet is a difficult and complicated matter. So serious and difficult, that comparatively few could acquire the art, and that [28] though in great measure this was confined to special classes, as the scribes who devoted themselves to the practice, and the priesthood who were invested with the power, yet the art of writing was understood and in common use to an extent incomprehensible when the difficulties of its acquirement are considered. ”