ALPHABET

(From the Gr. a.X(pct, ^Y,rot,, the two first Greek letters.) The letters of a written language, disposed in their regular order. An alphabetical language is one pos so ing an alphabet. 1. The first and most obvious mode by which thought can be expre ed and conveyed to the eye, is by the representation of actual objects. Hence the species of writing which the learned have termed ideographic, i. e. in which knowledge is conveyed, first, by representations of the objects of thought; secondly, by symbols. The origin of designing is coeval with that of mankind; and men early availed themselves of this art to make their thoughcs visible. To make it be understood, for example, that one man had killed another, they drew the figure of a dead man stretched on the ground, and of another standing by him upright, with some deadly weapon in his hand. To let it be known that some one had arrived by sea, they drew the figure of a man disembarking from a ship; and so on. This kind of writing, if we may so employ the word, was very early used in Egypt, and most probably, also, in most of the ancient nations. In Greek, the word y^x^uv signifies indifferently either to write or to paint. In Mexico, when the Spaniards landed, the inhabitants of the sea coast conve3'ed Intelligence of the event to Monte zum a by sending him a large cloth, on which they carefully painted what they had seen. It is unnece ary to insist on the difficulty and inconvenience of this method of writing; and to le en these, recourse was had to the symbolic or emblematic variety of ideographic writing. In this method abbreviations or characteristic parts were introduced instead of the entire object. Thus, the ancient Egyptians are said to have represented a siege by a scaling-ladder; a battle, by two hands holding a buckler and a bow, . Abstract ideas were, also, represented by sj-mbols, or sensible objects, supposed to have a certain analogy to them: as, ingratitude by a viper, providence by an eye, the head of a hawk, . 2. From ideographic was derived syllabic writing. It must have been early remarked that the sounds formed by the voice in spcakmg are articulate and well-defined; and the idea occurred of endeavouring to represent such sounds by appropriate signs. Thus the word rrpttblic, in the writing of which we use eight letters, would be written with three syllabic characters. The President de Goguet suspects that originally all the As^iatic nations, known to the ancients under the names of Syrians and A yrians, used the syllabic mode of writing. We may, he thinks, discern the vestiges of this in an ancient tradition which ascribes the invention of writing to the Syrians; but acknowledges that the Phoenicians improved, made it more simple, and brought the characters to perfection. But this mode of writing, though a vast improvement on what is purely ideographic, is still very imperfect and cumbersome. The vast number of characters required in it overburdens the memory, and occasions the greatest confusion. The existing language of the Chinese, which is partly ideographic and partly syllabic, is an exurxple of ALPHABETS. ARABIC. SANSCRIT. [s. 47]