Alphabet

Alphabet, so called from alpha and beta, the first two Greek letters, is the name given to a set of graphic signs, called letters, denoting elementary sounds, by the combination of which words can be visibly represented. Nearly 200 alphabets, ancient and modern, are known, of which about 50 are now in use. They are all developments from the primitive Phœnician alphabet, which was itself ultimately derived from the Egyptian hieroglyphic picture-writing. The alphabet is thus the oldest existing monument of civilisation, since its germs can be traced back to the earliest Egyptian dynasties.

All writing was in its origin pictorial. It began with ideograms, which developed into phonograms. Ideograms are pictures or symbols intended to represent either things or abstract ideas. Phonograms are the graphic symbols of sounds. They are either verbal, standing for entire words; or syllabic, denoting the articulations of which words are composed; or alphabetic, representing the elementary sounds into which syllables can be resolved.

Five independent systems of ideographic writing have been invented: (1) The Cuneiform, which arose in the valley of the Euphrates, and developed into the Achaemenian syllabaries. (2) The Chinese, out of which the Japanese syllabaries have arisen. (3) The Hittite, which was the probable source of the Cypriote syllabary. (4) The Mexican picture-writing. (5) The Egyptian hieroglyphics, from which the Phœnician alphabet was derived.

Mere mnemonic records, such as the wampum belts of the North American Indians, the quippus of Peru, or the totemistic marks on the grave-stones of semi-barbarous tribes, can hardly be dignified with the name of writing, and need not be further noticed; while the Cuneiform, the Chinese, and the Egyptian scripts will be treated of under their proper headings (see CUNEIFORM, CHINESE, and HIEROGLYPHICS).

To give even the briefest account of every known alphabet would require a volume. All that can be here attempted is to show how the Phœnician, the mother of all other alphabets, arose out of the

Egyptian picture-writing, and to explain the affiliation of a few of the more important daughter alphabets, such as the Hebrew, the Syriac, the Arabic, the Indian, the Greek, and last, but not least, the Roman alphabet which we ourselves employ.

The Egyptian hieroglyphic picture-writing may be traced back, by means of inscriptions, for more than six thousand years, to the time of the second Egyptian dynasty, when it already appears in great perfection, arguing a long period of antecedent development. It consisted of pictorial ideograms, which, at some unknown epoch, must have given birth to verbal phonograms, some of which came to be used as syllabic signs. Of the 400 Egyptian phonograms, about 45 attained an alphabetic character—that is, they either denoted vowels, or could be associated with more than one vowel-sound. Out of these alphabetic signs our own letters have grown. But though the Egyptian hieroglyphic writing contained the germs of the alphabet, it was not truly alphabetic. It remained to the last partly ideographic, partly phonetic. Alphabetic and syllabic signs are conjoined with verbal phonograms, and these are explained by means of pictorial ideograms. The transition to a pure alphabetic writing was only made when the Phœnicians borrowed the art of writing from the Egyptians. The supreme merit of the Phœnicians was that they rejected, once for all, the unnecessary portions of the complicated Egyptian system, the ideograms, the verbal phonograms, and the syllabic signs, and selected from the 45 variant symbols of elementary sounds a single sign for each of the 22 consonants which are found in Semitic speech. To ourselves the notion of alphabetic writing seems extremely simple, but in reality the passage from ideographic picture-writing to a pure alphabet is one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind, having been effected only once in the whole history of the world. None of the other systems of picture-writing, Chinese, Cuneiform, or Hittite, advanced beyond a more or less perfect stage of syllabism.

To a French scholar, M. de Rougé, belongs the honour of having demonstrated the true origin of the alphabet. Several classical writers, including Plato, Diodorus, Plutarch, and Tacitus, had stated in general terms the belief or tradition of the ancient world, that the Phœnicians had obtained the alphabet from Egypt, while in modern times not a few attempts had been vainly made to derive the several Phœnician letters from suitable hieroglyphic pictures. But it was only in 1859 that De Rougé pointed out that the prototypes of the Phœnician letters must be sought, not in the hieroglyphics of the monuments, but in certain cursive 'hieratic' or priestly characters, so extremely ancient that they had already fallen into disuse at the time of the Hebrew exodus. This form of hieratic writing is known to us almost exclusively from a single manuscript, the Papyrus Prisse, as it is called, which was found in a tomb belonging to the eleventh dynasty, and is therefore much older than the shepherd kings.

In the Papyrus Prisse, the characters bear hardly more resemblance to the hieroglyphs from which they were derived than they do to the earliest known forms of the Phœnician letters, the chief difference being due to the fact that the Egyptian was a cursive script, used for writing on papyrus; while the Phœnician letters are lapidary characters, adapted for engraving on stone. Hence straight lines are substituted for flowing curves, and sharp angles for rounded forms.

De Rougé shows, letter by letter, how twenty-one of the most suitable of the Egyptian characters were selected from the rest, and taken over; only one new letter, ayin, the source of our o, having been added by the Phœnicians. His identifications have, for the most part, been accepted by those scholars who are best entitled to speak with authority.

One important change, however, was made. The Egyptian characters were renamed, on the acrologic or initial principle, by means of words significant in Semitic speech; each of the new names being chosen from a resemblance, more or less close, between the form of the letter and some familiar object whose name began with the letter in question. Thus the first letter was no longer called ahom, the eagle, but aleph, the ox; and the thirteenth letter, instead of being mulak, the owl, became mem, the waters. In like manner, in our nursery picture-alphabets, the child is told that O was an orange, S was a swan, and B was a butterfly. A similar acrologic renaming of the letters by significant terms has repeatedly taken place on the transference of alphabets. We have instances in the case of the Runic, the Russian, and the Old Irish alphabets.

Exactly how, where, or when the Semitic alphabet was developed out of the Egyptian hieratic, it is impossible to say; but the probabilities point to its having originated with a Semitic people, possibly the Hebrews, or the Hyksos, but more probably a Phœnician colony settled in the Delta, while the probable limits of date lie between the 23d and the 17th centuries B.C.

These 22 letters of the Phœnician alphabet were the fruitful germs from which the letters of all other alphabets have been developed. In the Semitic alphabets, the number of letters has remained constant, though the outlines have been so degraded that, in some alphabets, such as the Arabic, many letters are almost formless; while in Aryan alphabets new letters have been abundantly developed by differentiation, a process well exemplified in our own alphabet, in which J has been evolved out of I, and G from C, while F, Y, V, U, and W are all descended from the Phœnician vau.

The chief difference between Semitic and Aryan alphabets is due to a fundamental distinction between the Semitic and Aryan languages. In the Semitic scripts there are no true vowels, these being denoted only by diacritical points; whereas in the Aryan alphabets, vowel-signs have been developed out of the characters representing the Semitic breaths and semi-consonants. The Semitic alphabets have also retained the original direction of the writing, from right to left; whereas in the non-Semitic scripts, the more convenient direction, from left to right, has been adopted.

Many attempts have been made to explain the order of the letters in the alphabet. It would take too much space to discuss fully this obscure question, but it is generally recognised that the order of the Hebrew letters exhibits traces of a primitive phonological classification. Omitting certain letters which do not readily fall into the scheme, and whose places may have been assigned at a later time, the original arrangement seems to have been in four classes, containing respectively the soft, the continuous, the liquid, and the hard letters; the first letter in each class being a faucal breath, the second a labial, the third a palatal, the fourth a dental, and the fifth probably a sibilant. The survivals of this arrangement are exhibited in the following table. The places assigned to the sibilants are hypothetical.

We have now to describe the chief families of alphabets to which the mother-alphabet of Phœnia gave birth. The reader will find it helpful to refer to the following genealogical table. It will be seen that there are three great families—(1) The Aramean, which became the source of most of the alphabets of Western Asia; (2) The Sabæan, or South Semitic, from which sprang the alphabets of India; (3) The Hellenic, which became the parent of the alphabets of Europe.

    graph LR
        Phœnician[PHŒNICIAN] --> Sabean[SABÆAN]
        Phœnician --> Indian[INDIAN]
        Phœnician --> Ethiopic[ETHIOPIC]
        Phœnician --> Aramean[ARAMEAN]
        
        Sabean --> Indian
        Indian --> Dravidian[DRAV-INDIAN]
        Indian --> Hellenic[HELLENIC]
        
        Dravidian --> Pahlavi[PAL.]
        Dravidian --> Nagari[NAGARI]
        Dravidian --> Telugu[Telugu.]
        Dravidian --> Canarese[Canarese.]
        
        Pahlavi --> Burmese[Burmese.]
        Pahlavi --> Siamese[Siamese.]
        Pahlavi --> Javanese[Javanese.]
        Pahlavi --> Singalese[Singalese.]
        Pahlavi --> Corean[Corean.]
        Pahlavi --> Tibetan[Tibetan.]
        Pahlavi --> Kashmiri[Kashmiri.]
        Pahlavi --> Gujarati[Gujarati.]
        Pahlavi --> Marathi[Marathi.]
        Pahlavi --> Bengali[Bengali.]
        Pahlavi --> Malayan[Malayan.]
        
        Hellenic --> Runic[Runic.]
        Hellenic --> Greek[Greek.]
        Hellenic --> Latin[Latin.]
        Hellenic --> Albanian[Albanian.]
        Hellenic --> Russian[Russian.]
        Hellenic --> Coptic[Coptic.]
        
        Aramean --> Hebrew[Hebrew.]
        Aramean --> Syriac[Syriac.]
        Aramean --> Mongolian[Mongolian.]
        Aramean --> Arabic[Arabic.]
        Aramean --> Pehlavi[Pehlavi.]
        Aramean --> Armenian[Armenian.]
        Aramean --> Georgian[Georgian.]
        
        Ethiopic --> Amharic[Amharic.]
    

The early history of the alphabet has to be reconstructed from inscriptions. The oldest forms of the Phœnician letters are seen in the inscriptions on certain bronze vessels dedicated to Baal Lebanon, which are attributed to the 11th century B.C. Next comes the Moabite stone, assigned to the 9th century; the lion weights from Nineveh, to the 8th; the Siloam inscription, to the 7th; and the Eshmunazar sarcophagus, to the 5th. The Phœnician alphabet gradually died out with the decline of the Phœnician empire and commerce, lingering on, in the Spanish colonies of Carthage, till the 3d century A.D., and leaving as its only direct descendant the alphabet used in the sacred books of the Samaritans.

Among the Semitic races it was superseded by the Aramean alphabet, which, arising in Northern Syria about the 7th century B.C., became the commercial alphabet of Western Asia. After an existence of seven or eight centuries, it broke up into a number of national alphabets, of which the most important are the square Hebrew, the Syriac, the Arabic, the Pehlavi, and the Mongolian, which owe their diffusion and their permanence to the fact of their having become the scripts of five of the great faiths of Asia—Judaism, Christianity, Mohammedanism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism.

The distinguishing peculiarity of the Aramean alphabet and its descendants lay in the opening out of the loops and the disappearance of the bars which characterise the Phœnician letters. Thus the Phœnician loops which have been faithfully preserved in our own letters B, D, O, Q, R, have disappeared in the corresponding Hebrew letters, as well as in their Arabic equivalents (see table).

The greater part of the Jewish Scriptures must have been written in the alphabet seen in the inscriptions on the Moabite stone and in the Siloam tunnel, which is practically identical with that used by the Phœnicians. On their return from the captivity at Babylon, the exiles brought

	EGYPTIAN		PHENICIAN	GREEK				LATIN			HEBREW
1		Ⲁ	ⲁ	A	A	λ	α	A	A	ⲁⲁⲁ	א
2		Ⲃ	Ⲃ	B	B	B	β	β	B	B	ⲁⲁⲁ	ב
3		ⲃ	ⲃ	ⲃ	ⲃ	ⲃ	ⲃ	ⲃ	C	C	ⲁⲁⲁ	ג
4		Ⲅ	Ⲅ	Ⲅ	Ⲅ	Ⲅ	Ⲅ	Ⲅ	D	D	ⲁⲁⲁ	ד
5		ⲅ	ⲅ	ⲅ	ⲅ	ⲅ	ⲅ	ⲅ	E	E	ⲁⲁⲁ	ה
6		Ⲇ	Ⲇ	Ⲇ	Ⲇ	Ⲇ	Ⲇ	Ⲇ	F	F	ⲁⲁⲁ	ו
7		ⲇ	ⲇ	ⲇ	ⲇ	ⲇ	ⲇ	ⲇ	Z	Z	ⲁⲁⲁ	ז
8		Ⲉ	Ⲉ	Ⲉ	Ⲉ	Ⲉ	Ⲉ	Ⲉ	H	H	ⲁⲁⲁ	ח
9		ⲉ	ⲉ	ⲉ	ⲉ	ⲉ	ⲉ	ⲉ			ⲁⲁⲁ	ט
10		Ⲋ	Ⲋ	Ⲋ	Ⲋ	Ⲋ	Ⲋ	Ⲋ	I	I	ⲁⲁⲁ	י
11		ⲋ	ⲋ	ⲋ	ⲋ	ⲋ	ⲋ	ⲋ	K	K	ⲁⲁⲁ	כ
12		Ⲍ	Ⲍ	Ⲍ	Ⲍ	Ⲍ	Ⲍ	Ⲍ	L	L	ⲁⲁⲁ	ל
13		ⲍ	ⲍ	ⲍ	ⲍ	ⲍ	ⲍ	ⲍ	M	M	ⲁⲁⲁ	מ
14		Ⲏ	Ⲏ	Ⲏ	Ⲏ	Ⲏ	Ⲏ	Ⲏ	N	N	ⲁⲁⲁ	נ
15		ⲏ	ⲏ	ⲏ	ⲏ	ⲏ	ⲏ	ⲏ	+	+	ⲁⲁⲁ	ס
16			Ⲑ	Ⲑ	Ⲑ	Ⲑ	Ⲑ	Ⲑ			ⲁⲁⲁ	ע
17		ⲑ	ⲑ	ⲑ	ⲑ	ⲑ	ⲑ	ⲑ	P	P	ⲁⲁⲁ	פ
18		Ⲓ	Ⲓ	Ⲓ	Ⲓ	Ⲓ	Ⲓ	Ⲓ			ⲁⲁⲁ	צ
19		ⲓ	ⲓ	ⲓ	ⲓ	ⲓ	ⲓ	ⲓ	Q	Q	ⲁⲁⲁ	ק
20		Ⲕ	Ⲕ	Ⲕ	Ⲕ	Ⲕ	Ⲕ	Ⲕ	R	R	ⲁⲁⲁ	ר
21		ⲕ	ⲕ	ⲕ	ⲕ	ⲕ	ⲕ	ⲕ	S	S	ⲁⲁⲁ	ש
22		Ⲗ	Ⲗ	Ⲗ	Ⲗ	Ⲗ	Ⲗ	Ⲗ	T	T	ⲁⲁⲁ	ת
	I	II	III	IV	V	VI	VII	VIII	IX	X	XI

• I. Egyptian Hieroglyphics, facing to the left.
• II. Egyptian Hieratic characters, facing to the right.
• III. The oldest Phœnician letters, mostly from the Baal Lebanon inscription.
• IV. The oldest Greek letters, from inscriptions at Thera and Athens, reading from right to left.
• V. The lapidary Greek alphabet at the time of the Persian war, reading from left to right.
• VI. Greek uncials, from the Codex Alexandrinus, about 400 A.D.
• VII. Greek minuscules.
• VIII. The old alphabet of Italy.
• IX. Lapidary Latin alphabet at the time of Cicero.
• X. Latin uncials and minuscules.
• XI. Modern square Hebrew, derived from the Phœnician letters in Col. III.

with them the Aramean script used in the valley of the Euphrates. After the 1st century B.C. this alphabet developed into two branches—the northern, which became the parent of the Syriac alphabets; and the southern, which developed into the square Hebrew. This only assumed its present style about the 12th century, and is thus one of the most modern of existing alphabets, and not, as was formerly believed, the most ancient of all. The Hebrew vowel-points date from about the 7th century. The Syriac arose out of a form of the Northern Aramean alphabet, locally employed at Edessa, which was a great seat of Christian learning. The older form of Syriac, which enshrines an important Christian literature, is called the Estranghelo. This developed into a more curious style called the Peshito, which is still used by the Christians of Aleppo. A curious descendant of the Syriac alphabet is the Mongolian, which arose indirectly out of the heresy of the Nestorians, who, being condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431 A.D., took refuge in Persia, whence their missionaries penetrated into the remotest parts of Asia, carrying with them their alphabet, which became the parent, on the one hand, of the Karshnni, used by the Christians of St Thomas on the Malabar coast of India, and, on the other, of the Mongolian, Kalmuck, and Manchu alphabets, which stretch intermittently across Northern Asia from the Volga to the Sea of Japan. Prior to the extension of Mohammedanism, the Mongolian was the official alphabet of the vast empire of Genghis Khan, and was used in Khiva and Bokhara, which now employ the Arabic. The Mongolian is written in vertical columns, from the top to the bottom of the page, instead of from right to left, like the Syriac, Arabic, and Hebrew.

In the valley of the Euphrates, the Aramean alphabet gradually exterminated the cumbrous Cuneiform scripts, and became the parent of the Iranian family of alphabets, which are known chiefly from the coins and inscriptions of the Parthian and Sassanian kings who ruled Persia from the 3d century B.C. to the Mohammedan conquest in the 7th century A.D., when Arabic became the script of Persia. The old Persian or Pehlevi writing was taken to India by fugitives from Islam, and is still used by the Parsees, or fire-worshippers of Bombay, for their sacred books.

In the 5th century A.D. the western or Arsacidian form of the Pehlevi alphabet, which is akin to the Palmyrene alphabet used in the inscriptions of Zenobia, was reformed and adapted to the use of the Armenians by St Mesrob, who also constructed the Georgian alphabet out of the eastern or Sassanian form of the Pehlevi writing. But the most interesting offshoot of the Iranian alphabet was the Bactrian, which, before the conquests of Alexander, extended over the eastern provinces of the Persian realm to Merv, Herat, and Bokhara, and even reached the Punjab, which formed the Indian satrapy of the empire of Darius. The chief monument of the Indo-Bactrian alphabet is the long inscription engraved on a rock near Peshawar by Asoka, the great Buddhist emperor, who reigned in the 3d century B.C.; but it can be traced by means of the coins of the Indo-Scythian kings nearly to the close of the 1st century A.D. It has left a curious survival in the numerals which we ordinarily use. These, which we call the Arabic ciphers, are really of Indian origin, having been brought from India by the Arabs, and introduced by them into Spain, whence, during the 12th and 13th centuries, they spread over Europe, gradually replacing the more clumsy Roman numerals. Thus our cipher 5 is the Indo-Bactrian letter p, the initial of the Sanskrit word panchan, five (cf. Greek πέντε). Our 4 is the letter ch, the initial of the Sanskrit chatur, four (cf. Latin quatuor), and 7 is an s, the initial of saptan, seven. Few things in the history of the alphabet are more curious than the fact, first discovered by Dr Isaac Taylor, that the numeral signs of Europe and America are the letters of an obscure alphabet introduced into India 2400 years ago as a consequence of the conquests of Darius.

The Iranian alphabets of Central Asia were suddenly exterminated by the Arabic, whose rapid diffusion was one of the most remarkable results of the spread of Islam. It extends from Morocco to Sumatra, from Bokhara to Zanzibar, and, with some trifling modifications, it has been adapted to express the sounds of languages as diverse as Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Pushtu, Beluchi, Hindustani, and Malay.

THE GREEK, HEBREW, AND ARABIC ALPHABETS.

As the square Hebrew and the Syriac arose out of the local alphabets of Jerusalem and Edessa, so the Arabic, next after the Latin the most important alphabet in the world, was originally only the local alphabet of Mecca. It has two forms—the Kufic, a monumental script now almost disused; and the Neskh, which is the cursive Arabic in ordinary use.

There were two early alphabets in Arabia. The Arabic is descended from the Nabathean, an Aramean alphabet of Northern and Central Arabia, known to us chiefly from inscriptions, dating from the 1st to the 5th century A.D., engraved on the rocks of Petra and Sinai. On the other hand, numerous inscriptions, some as old as the 2d century B.C., chiefly from the neighbourhood of Aden, show that a very different alphabet, called the Sabean or Himyaritic, was employed in Arabia Felix. It seems to have been derived from the alphabet of Tyre, and may probably have been obtained as early as the time of Hiram. Carried to the opposite coast of Africa, it became the parent of the alphabets of the Abyssinian Christians, called the Ethiopic and the Amharic, in which new letters have been added, and their order and some of their names changed, while the alphabet has been converted into a syllabary.

But the chief interest of the Sabean alphabet arises from its having become the parent of the modern scripts of India, which comprise more than half of the existing alphabets. We have already seen that an Aramean alphabet was introduced into the Punjab through Afghanistan about 500 B.C., but this was ultimately replaced by an offshoot of the alphabet of Yemen, which, about the same time, must have been brought to the ports of Western India by Arabian merchants. From the inscriptions of Asoka, the Constantine of India, whose edicts, engraved on rocks and pillars, extend across the whole breadth of India from Gujarat to Orissa, we obtain a knowledge of the ancient type of the Indian alphabet. In the hands of the early Indian grammarians it became the most perfect scientific alphabet of the world. Consisting of forty-two letters—thirty-three consonants and nine vowels—it is capable of expressing the most delicate gradations of the Sanskrit sounds.

The developments of the primitive Indian alphabet may be traced, by means of inscriptions, from the time of Asoka, in the 3d century B.C., to the 10th century A.D., when the prototypes of the present provincial alphabets of India had established themselves. The existing vernacular alphabets divide themselves into four well-marked groups: (1) The Pali, or Buddhist, comprising alphabets used in Ceylon, Burma, Siam, Pegu, Cambodia, Java, and Corea. (2) The Nagari, or Hindu, of which an old form is used for Sanskrit books, and to which belong the local alphabets of Northern India, including those of Bengal, Kashmir, Nepal, Tibet, Gujarat, and the Punjab. (3) The Dravidian, used in Southern India, of which the Tamil and Telugu are the chief varieties. (4) The Malay, used in Celebes, the Philippines, and Sumatra.

The alphabet of Southern Arabia, the parent of the numerous Indian scripts, branched off from the Phœnician stem about the 10th century B.C., a date which must also be assigned to a still more important offshoot of the Phœnician. This was the Hellenic branch, the source of the alphabets of Europe and America. A Greek legend refers the introduction of the alphabet to Cadmus, the Tyrian. Cadmus is an eponymic name, meaning in Semitic speech 'the man of the East.' Herodotus tells us that Cadmus landed first in Thera, an island in which the oldest Greek inscriptions have been found. But this legend is a very small portion of the evidence for the Phœnician origin of the Greek alphabet. It is established by the forms of the letters, which in the oldest Greek inscriptions do not differ appreciably from those in early Phœnician records; by the order of the letters, which is the same in the Greek and Phœnician alphabets; and also by their names, which are significant Semitic words, though meaningless in Greek. Thus Alpha is the Semitic aleph, an ox; Beta is beth, a house; Gamma is gimel, a camel; Delta is dalet, a door; Epsilon is he, a window; Eta is cheth, a fence; Theta is teth, a serpent; Iota is yod, a hand; Kappa is kaph, the palm of the hand; Lambda is lamed, an ox-goad; Mu is mem, the waters; Nu is nun, a fish; O-micron is ayin, an eye; Pi is pe, the mouth; Rho is resh, the head; and Tau is tau, a mark or cross.

A knowledge of alphabetical writing must have been obtained by the Greeks from the Phœnician trading settlements in the Ægean, as early as the 10th century B.C. At the date of the oldest Greek inscriptions which are extant, three vowels, alpha, epsilon, and omicron, had already been evolved out of the Phœnician breaths, aleph, he, and ayin, and two, iota and upsilon, from the semi-consonants yod and vau. The forms of the letters had undergone hardly any change, and the direction of the writing is still retrograde, from right to left, as in the Semitic scripts. Somewhat later, the direction is boustrophedon, or 'ploughwise,' the lines proceeding alternately from right to left, and from left to right, just as the plough draws the alternate furrows in opposite directions. Before the close of the 7th century, the more convenient plan of writing all the lines from left to right was adopted.

By the middle of the 6th century, the Greek alphabet had in all essential respects attained its final development. The letters had assumed the forms of the Greek capitals with which we are familiar; two additional vowels had been evolved, eta from cheth, and omega from omicron; phi had been differentiated out of theta, chi out of kappa, and psi probably out of phi; while F, Q, and san, descended from vau, goph, and tsadde, were disused as letters, though they were still retained as numerals. About the 3d century B.C. the lapidary characters, which correspond to the capitals in Greek printed books, began to be replaced by more rounded forms which are called uncials, while cursive forms were used for correspondence. Finally, between the 7th and 9th centuries A.D., the minuscules, which are the small letters of our printed Greek books, were evolved from a combination of uncials and cursive.

The foregoing account refers to the Ionian alphabet, which grew up on the coasts of Asia Minor, and was adopted as the alphabet of Athens in 403 B.C. But the Greek alphabet, from a very early time, shows a tendency to separate into two types—the Eastern or Ionian, which became the classical alphabet of Greece; and the Western or Chalcidian, which was the source of the alphabet of Italy. The chief differences between the two are those which still distinguish our own from the Greek alphabet. In the Western alphabet, F and Q were retained; H continued to be a breath, instead of developing into a vowel; and the forms of l, r, p, x, s, became L, R, P, X, S, instead of Λ, Ρ, Π, Ξ, Σ.

The primitive alphabet of Italy, from which our own is derived, belonged to the Western Greek type. As early, probably, as the 9th century B.C., it was carried by the Chalcidians of Eubœa to Cunnæ, near Naples, which was a colony of Chalcis. It became the parent of five local Italic alphabets—the Oscan, the Etruscan, the Umbrian, the Faliscan, and the Latin. Owing to the political supremacy of Rome, the Latin ultimately displaced the other national scripts of Italy, and became the alphabet of the Roman empire, and afterwards of Latin Christendom, thus spreading over Western Europe, America, and Australia, and becoming the dominant alphabet of the world; its only rival as a cosmopolitan script being the alphabet of the Koran.

Curiously enough, this, the most modern of alphabets, has adhered more closely than any other to the primitive Phœnician type. Of the Phœnician letters, the Greek alphabet discarded three and added five, while the Latin has only discarded two and added three. Its archaic character is shown by the use of the older forms, L and S, instead of Λ and Σ, and by its retention of the older value of H, and of the letters F and Q, which the Greek alphabet has lost. But it lost φ, χ, and θ, as letters, whose Western forms, however, are retained as the Roman numerals, M, L, and C.

At the time of the early empire, the Romans employed two forms of their letters—capitals for inscriptions; and for business and correspondence, degraded cursive forms, which are known to us chiefly from graffiti scribbled by schoolboys on the walls of Pompeian houses. These two Roman scripts are respectively the sources of our own printed capitals, and of our printed minuscules or small types. Out of the Roman cursive, the Irish semi-uncial was developed as a book-hand about the 6th century A.D. Through Scotland it was introduced into Northumbria by Irish monks, and became the basis of the beautiful Caroline minuscule, so called because it arose in the reign of Charlemagne, in the calligraphic school at Tours, founded by Alcuin of York.

Owing to its intrinsic merits, consisting in its legibility, and the ease with which it could be written, the Caroline minuscule rapidly became the book-hand of Europe; but, after the 12th century, it began to degenerate into the black-letter, which was imitated in the types of the earliest printers, and is still retained in German books. The Roman printers, however, reverted to the better Caroline forms, which now go by the name of 'Roman' type. These types were brought to Paris in 1470, and fifty years later to England, where they displaced the black-letter which had been previously used.

The wide difference existing between the forms of our capital and smaller letters is thus explained. We have, in fact, two alphabets, both dating from the 1st century A.D., in concurrent use. Thus the forms a, b, d, r, g, m, h, are derived from the old Roman cursive, while A, B, D, R, G, M, H, are the Roman capitals. In d, the loop of D has been transferred from the right to the left of the vertical stroke; in g, two new loops have been formed, the little crook at the top being all that remains of G; in b, the upper loop of B opened out, and ultimately disappeared; in r, the loop and tail of R have undergone nearly complete atrophy; while in f, the tick to the left is all that remains of the lower curve of S (see table on p. 187).

In our own alphabet, the order of the letters does not differ very greatly from the Phœnician arrangement, but the few changes are historically instructive. The last Phœnician letter was t, which in our alphabet is followed by six letters, u, v, w, x, y, z. Of these, u dates from the 9th century B.C., having been differentiated by the Greeks out of F, and placed after t, the last of the old letters. Originally, u and v were only the medial and initial forms of the same letter. In the 10th century A.D. the first came to be used for the vowel, and the second for the consonant, because in Latin words the consonant usually occurs at the beginning, and the vowel in the middle of words, and the two forms were regarded as separate letters, and placed side by side in the alphabet. So also with w, which arose in the 11th century as a ligature, like æ, fi, or &, the ligature for et. It was originally written vu, and then ve, out of which W arose. These new forms were squeezed in, so to speak, between u, the last of the old Greek letters, and X, the last of the original Latin letters. The letter x was developed out of samekh (s), about the 7th century B.C., and was placed at the end of the old Latin alphabet. In the time of Cicero, the Romans borrowed Y from the Greek alphabet, to denote the sound of upsilon, and placed it at the end of the alphabet after X. Soon afterwards, Z was also borrowed from the Greek alphabet and placed after Y. It was introduced into the English alphabet from the French in the 15th century, being only used in English, as in Latin, to spell words of foreign origin. The letters I and J, like U and V, were the medial and initial forms of the same letter; but since the consonantal sound usually occurs at the beginning of words, and the vowel-sound in the middle, J was conveniently appropriated in the 15th century for the consonant, and I for the vowel. The dot of j, which is needless, is a mere survival, showing that the two forms were differentiated after the practice of dotting the i had come into vogue. In the 11th century, the letter was accented, i, for convenience, when it came next to u, m, or n; in the 14th, the accent was changed to a dot; and it was only in the 15th that the dot became universal. In the Latin and English alphabets, the seventh letter is g; while in the Phœnician, as well as in the Greek, the seventh letter is z. We have already seen why z was removed to the end of the alphabet. The third letter originally had the value of g, but its symbol, C, came in Latin to have both sounds, c and g. This was inconvenient, and the form G was differentiated out of C, to denote the latter sound, and was transferred in the 3d century B.C. to the seventh place, hitherto occupied by z, which had fallen out of use, not being required for Latin words, and was only reborrowed two hundred years later for the transliteration of Greek words.

The Anglo-Saxons adopted into their alphabet two of the Runes, p, called wen, for w, and þ, called thorn, for th. The first was disused after the invention of W, but the other is still occasionally employed by old-fashioned people, who write 'ye' for 'the,' the Y-shaped letter being merely a survival of the thorn Rune, ultimately a derivative of the Greek delta.

Our letters are named on the same principle as in the Latin alphabet. The vowels are called by their sounds; the consonants, by the sound of the letter combined with the easiest vowel, which, for convenience of utterance, precedes the continuants and follows the explosives. Thus we have ef, el, em, en, er, es, but be, de, ge, pe, te, because ef is easier to pronounce than fe, while, on the other hand, be is easier than eb. The letters k, h, q, and x, which are pronounced further back, are each combined with the appropriate back vowel, for facility of pronunciation. The name of z is an exception to the rule. We call it zed and not ez, because the letter, with its Greek name zeta, was introduced into the Latin alphabet from the Greek after the Latin letters had acquired the names by which we know them.

The Greek alphabet was the source, not only of the Latin, but of the other national alphabets of Europe. The Runes, which formed the alphabet of the Scandinavian nations, were based on early forms of the Greek letters, which, as Dr Isaac Taylor has shown, were obtained about the 6th century B.C. from Greek colonies on the Black Sea, by Gothic tribes who then inhabited the region south of the Baltic (see RUNES). The Oghams, used in the earliest inscriptions of Wales and Ireland, seem to have been based upon the Runes (see OGHAMS). The Mæso-Gothic alphabet was constructed by Ulphilas in the 4th century, by a combination of the Runes and the contemporary Greek uncials. The Coptic alphabet, used in Egypt, was also derived from the Greek uncials of the 4th century A.D., with six additional characters borrowed from the Egyptian Demotic, a cursive script derived from the hieroglyphic writing. The Slavonic alphabets, of which the Russian is the most important, were obtained from the 9th-century Byzantine uncial, with some additional characters derived from ligatures employed in the Greek cursive writing. The obscure Albanian alphabet is merely a debased form of minuscule Greek. See also LETTERS, WRITING.

The standard work on the subject is Dr Isaac Taylor's The Alphabet (2 vols. 1883; new ed. 1899). The reader may also consult L'Alphabet Phénicien, by F. Lenormant; Das Griechische Alphabet, by Kirchhof; Gardthausen's Griechische Palcographie; Wattenbach's Anleitung; Ballhorn's Alphabet; Faulmann's Buch der Schrift, and other books referred to in Dr Taylor's work.