THE ALPHABET ACHIEVED

We cannot believe that any nation could have vaulted to the final
stage of the simple alphabetical writing without tracing the
devious and difficult way of the pictograph and the syllabary. It
is possible, however, for a cultivated nation to build upon the
shoulders of its neighbors, and, profiting by the experience of
others, to make sudden leaps upward and onward. And this is
seemingly what happened in the final development of the art of
writing. For while the Babylonians and Assyrians rested content
with their elaborate syllabary, a nation on either side of them,
geographically speaking, solved the problem, which they perhaps
did not even recognize as a problem; wrested from their syllabary
its secret of consonants and vowels, and by adopting an arbitrary
sign for each consonantal sound, produced that most wonderful of
human inventions, the alphabet.

The two nations credited with this wonderful achievement are the
Phoenicians and the Persians. But it is not usually conceded that
the two are entitled to anything like equal credit. The Persians,
probably in the time of Cyrus the Great, used certain characters
of the Babylonian script for the construction of an alphabet; but
at this time the Phoenician alphabet had undoubtedly been in use
for some centuries, and it is more than probable that the Persian
borrowed his idea of an alphabet from a Phoenician source. And
that, of course, makes all the difference. Granted the idea of an
alphabet, it requires no great reach of constructive genius to
supply a set of alphabetical characters; though even here, it may
be added parenthetically, a study of the development of alphabets
will show that mankind has all along had a characteristic
propensity to copy rather than to invent.

Regarding the Persian alphabet-maker, then, as a copyist rather
than a true inventor, it remains to turn attention to the
Phoenician source whence, as is commonly believed, the original
alphabet which became "the mother of all existing alphabets" came
into being. It must be admitted at the outset that evidence for
the Phoenician origin of this alphabet is traditional rather than
demonstrative. The Phoenicians were the great traders of
antiquity; undoubtedly they were largely responsible for the
transmission of the alphabet from one part of the world to
another, once it had been invented. Too much credit cannot be
given them for this; and as the world always honors him who makes
an idea fertile rather than the originator of the idea, there can
be little injustice in continuing to speak of the Phoenicians as
the inventors of the alphabet. But the actual facts of the case
will probably never be known. For aught we know, it may have been
some dreamy-eyed Israelite, some Babylonian philosopher, some
Egyptian mystic, perhaps even some obscure Cretan, who gave to
the hard-headed Phoenician trader this conception of a
dismembered syllable with its all-essential, elemental,
wonder-working consonant. But it is futile now to attempt even to
surmise on such unfathomable details as these. Suffice it that
the analysis was made; that one sign and no more was adopted for
each consonantal sound of the Semitic tongue, and that the entire
cumbersome mechanism of the Egyptian and Babylonian writing
systems was rendered obsolescent. These systems did not yield at
once, to be sure; all human experience would have been set at
naught had they done so. They held their own, and much more than
held their own, for many centuries. After the Phoenicians as a
nation had ceased to have importance; after their original script
had been endlessly modified by many alien nations; after the
original alphabet had made the conquest of all civilized Europe
and of far outlying portions of the Orient--the Egyptian and
Babylonian scribes continued to indite their missives in the same
old pictographs and syllables.

The inventive thinker must have been struck with amazement when,
after making the fullest analysis of speech-sounds of which he
was capable, he found himself supplied with only a score or so of
symbols. Yet as regards the consonantal sounds he had exhausted
the resources of the Semitic tongue. As to vowels, he scarcely
considered them at all. It seemed to him sufficient to use one
symbol for each consonantal sound. This reduced the hitherto
complex mechanism of writing to so simple a system that the
inventor must have regarded it with sheer delight. On the other
hand, the conservative scholar doubtless thought it distinctly
ambiguous. In truth, it must be admitted that the system was
imperfect. It was a vast improvement on the old syllabary, but it
had its drawbacks. Perhaps it had been made a bit too simple;
certainly it should have had symbols for the vowel sounds as well
as for the consonants. Nevertheless, the vowel-lacking alphabet
seems to have taken the popular fancy, and to this day Semitic
people have never supplied its deficiencies save with certain
dots and points.

Peoples using the Aryan speech soon saw the defect, and the
Greeks supplied symbols for several new sounds at a very early
day.[8] But there the matter rested, and the alphabet has
remained imperfect. For the purposes of the English language
there should certainly have been added a dozen or more new
characters. 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


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