Méndez, L. (2012). Who shaped letter likes this?. Unpublished manuscript, Languages Department, Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Cholula, México. Retrieved from:
http://www.enlapuntadelalengua.com.mx/2012/09/who-shaped-letters-like-this.html
Introduction
Starting from the moment
we open our eyes every morning, we are bombarded with a great range of
information regularly written, and therefore decoded thanks to one of the most
important invention ever created by humankind. Although, it may seem easy and ordinary
to follow the directions to make pancakes for breakfast or even to read the
shampoo label when we forgot to bring something more interesting to analyze
while going to the bathroom; most of us are not truly conscious of the immense
historical, cultural and social phenomena that made possible to our “modern
world” to decipher each other’s thoughts without using uttered sounds, but
instead a silly set of approximately twenty-six arbitrary and
sound-representative symbols called alphabet that make a exclusive sound appear
in our minds. We have been obligated to memorize and understand this set of
symbols since early stages of our childhood, and even though it is difficult to
picture right now if it had been otherwise you would not be able to obtain
meaning out of what is written in this paper or of any minuscule piece of
information available on walls, doors, menus or labels. We all came into this
world ignoring the fact that sooner or later many of us (I wish I could say
all) were going to be more or less forced to become literate, in opposition to
spoken language which left us no other choice than to acquire it by the mere deed
of being constantly exposed to an environment where a certain linguistic code
was spoken; thus is exactly in that point where we can discriminate between
spoken language being natural or spontaneous and written language artificial or
invented, since independently of how much time an individual is exposed to
written language, he will not become literate unless someone teaches him at
least the most basic conventions of it, as for instance the alphabet.
http://www.enlapuntadelalengua.com.mx/2012/09/who-shaped-letters-like-this.html
Introduction
It is true that many other terrific
men-made inventions catch our attention easier because of its innovative nature
and technological “benefits” to our today’s environment; nonetheless, writing is
perhaps the single creation that has been around for the longest time evolving gradually
in order to adapt to the speech community that is using it. Writing per se is considered to be a polygenic
invention that emerged all around the world as a protohistoric set of symbols
used as a mnemonic system, such as quipus[1]
in today’s Peru (Cardona, 1994).
Despite the fact that there have been some researches focused on the ancient
Sumerian culture as being the pioneer of all the subsequent cuneiform[2] scripts
of the Near East (Sampsom, 1990), most authors agree that the actual history of
writing begins with the Egyptian hieroglyphs about 4,000 years ago. This
civilization was hypothetically the first to develop their pictographs into
alphabetic writing and apply them in writing. Although it did not have the same
structured agreements that we share nowadays to make written intelligibility
possible, it was based on a pictographs in combination with elements that
operated as phonemes and syllables. However, when it was first discovered, philosophers
of those days classified these icons as unfathomable signs with natural
mysticism that later on was discovered to be a decodable set of signs syllables
and letters (Man, 2000). The ancient Egyptian is believed to be the basis for
most alphabets still used nowadays in the Western World; nonetheless, as this
script continued its development also did its users, resources and transmission
materials. According to Thompsom (1942) the Egyptian writing can be divided
into threes phases or periods.
· Hieroglyphic-Old Empire (3400-2475 B.C.)
The
secret priestly writing continued to be used until the first century B.C. It
appears on ancient tombs and monuments.
· Hieratic-Middle Empire (2160-1788 B.C.)
Hieroglyphs
continued to be written in stone, but manuscripts in ink on papyrus show this simplified
form. Exclusively royalty and the priesthood used both.
· Demotic-New Empire (after 1500 B.C.)
Language and writing
undergoes further modification in non-religious texts until the sixth century
B.C. those final simplified style emerges in common commercial use.
All this knowledge became part of the
European “source of wisdom” thanks to the discovery of an ancient stone that is
known today as the Rosetta’s stone. Contrastively to the common belief of most
people nowadays, this name conveys more than the trademark label for a popular
language course, in fact if it was not because of this finding it would have
been impossible to unearth the origin of a truly cultural concept such as the
Roman alphabet. Legend has it that at the very end of the 18th
century when Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt, a milestone was achieved thanks
to a certain Lieutenant Boussard who was wandering about the village of
Rossetta near the Nile’s river mouth, there he found a huge black basalt stone
about four feet long sticking out of the sand. He noticed that the rock was
covered with strange symbols he could not understand, so he reported it to his
superior. When Napoleon found out about the discovery, he ordered its relocation
to Cairo where specialists studied it. Everyone was amazed when they revealed
that there were three different codes[3]
coexisting on the Rosetta stone. Despite the fact that they thought it would be
easy to translate the hieroglyphs, forty years went by until Jean François Champollion
finally found the key that enabled today’s Egyptologists to continue decoding
the truth behind ancient Egypt.
Something amazing that it has been found as
this quest for the truth progressed is that the hieroglyphic system did not go
through a protracted gestation process; Therefore, the assumption that the
proto-predecessor of the Roman alphabet could have been invented by only one
man, might be valid. To summarize centuries of cultural development, it has
been said that last phase for the hieroglyphic script arrived when Christianity
was introduced to Egypt with an alphabet derived mainly from Greek, which
adopted some features of hieroglyphic writing and was used to write the last
part of the Egyptian language commonly known as Copts (Fischer, 1992).
As writing is a polygenic creation, Egypt
was not the only place where writing had begun. Although, in different epochs
and places all over Earth, there is proof of different writing systems that
adopted their own characteristics to visually represent what a certain culture
perceived of their environment, and life itself.
· In the Far East with the
Chinese script created approximately on 1200-1054 B.C; which relied almost
exclusively on logograms[4] and diverged
entirely of its contemporaries from the Middle East. (DeFrances, 1989).
· In Scandinavia the
runic script[5]
was the written system that commanded on those lands for more than four
centuries before Christianity attained on imposing the Roman alphabet
(Spurkland, 2006).
· In the Americas the
hypothetical most ancient script was found in southern Veracruz, Mexico a couple of years ago. Apparently
the creators of this script were the Olmecs about three thousand years ago
(Briggs, 2006).
· The Arabic scripts
dates from 4th century A.D. This script was also used to write
languages such as: Swahili, Turkish and Spanish and nowadays is the second must
used after the Roman alphabet. (“Arabic”,
2012).
Although, the
aforementioned writing systems were not related to the Roman alphabet, there
were two important cultures that are believed to be the most influential
cultures upon western civilization than all the others that preceded them. The
Phoenicians and the Israelites were two small Semitic[6] cultures
that rose about 2500 B.C. and claimed the Persian Gulf as their ancestral home.
However, theses allied civilization migrated to the land of Canaan[7]
sometime about 2200 B.C., where their writing system became influenced by the
Egyptian form of writing that was later on simplified to a linear system to
which we owe our alphabet.
The Phoenician Empire achieved its greatest
splendor around 1600 B.C. when the Egyptians mentioned the first Phoenician
city on its recordings. Due to its commercial supremacy, the Phoenician culture
spread all over the neighbor societies surrounding the Mediterranean basin, and
so did the use of their alphabet, which became popular in all countries with
which they came in contact. The most important connection is considered to be
with the Greek civilization, where early traders introduced the Moabite[8]
version shortly after the Trojan War, that would significantly influence the development
of the Greek alphabet with respect to consonants, since the Phoenician alphabet
did not have yet graphic representation for vowels (Thompsom, 1942).
Petrie (1900) states
the following:
What is really dude to
the Phoenicians seems to have beenthe selection of a
short series (only half the amount of the surviving alphabets)
for numerical purposes, as A-I, E-5,P-100, 0-500, etc. This
usage would soon render these signs as invariable in
order as our numbers, and force theuse of them on all
countries with which the Phoenicianstraded. This exactly
explains the phenomena of the Greek alphabets; many in variety, and so diverse that each has to be learned separately, and yet entirely uniform in order.
As years went by, the Phoenicians started
to establish colonies in Melos, Rhodes and other Aegean island. There has been
a lot of discrepancy in whether or not the Phoenicians were the creators of
this script; however, all the world now believes that it was them, based on the
fact that the Greeks itself called their letters Φοινικικά γράμματα, “Phoenician letters”. The Greeks eventually started to make major changes
in the alphabet, such as the transition from a spiral arrangement of words and
letters to the left- to right writing in succeeding lines that is used today.
Even though, the Phoenician alphabet already had vowel sounds, these were not
graphically represented; hence, the Greeks were the one who developed spelling
for: alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron and upsilon. Moreover, among the Greek civilization there were two
distinct alphabets: the Eastern, introduced by the Phoenicians in the Aegean
islands, Ionia and later into Greece mainland and the Western introduced to Greece
by overland routes possibly from Lydian or Aramean sources. Subsequently, with
numerous changes in shapes, order and inclusion/exclusion of letters, these
alphabets would evolve in what is today the classic Greek alphabet[9]and the Roman alphabet[10] (Mason, 1940).
Likewise, a proto
version of the Latin alphabet based on the Western Greek alphabet, arrived to
the coasts of southern Italy around the eighth century B.C. where it continued
its development, that consisted in a mixture of all the alphabets to obtain as
a result the Etruscan alphabet, which contained the 22 Phoenician letter, 4
Greek vowels, as well as san (M) and sigma (Σ) that have never been together before in any Greek
alphabet. The
Etruscans were a very mysterious civilization, which is believed comes from
Asia Minor and settled in Northern Italy to continue spreading through Italy,
while developing the alphabet until they arrived to the south. Although, the
Etruscan alphabet went even through more modifications, such as the elimination
of 7 letters and the substitution of the corresponding letter to f by our current numeral 8; something
interesting that led to the materialization of our current alphabet was the
need to write longer vowels, which back then was done by writing the same vowel
twice. Later on, on those languages that required[11]
vowel extension, different diacritics were added on top of the doubled vowels,
as for instance ä ö and å in the
Swedish alphabet.
Finally, when Latins adopted the
Etruscan alphabet several changes continued to happen. The most important were
the creation of Capital letters and orthography modifications concerning to K,
C and Q interchangeability. The most recent ones that configured the alphabet
we have had since the 16th century were: the addition of J out of I[12],
the inclusion of V out of U and the addition of W which was created by the
Anglo-Saxons because of their need to find a middle ground between V and U,
which was established by putting two U’s together and it can be noticed in the
given name to that letter (Moorehouse, 1961).
As a conclusion, it should be said
that in contrast to most common beliefs writing is without any doubt the human
creation that has gone through the most complex and extensive evolution,
perhaps because of the intrinsic need of humanity for immortalizing all the
details and thoughts of its current reality. Is feasible that as time goes by
and the languages spoken all over the world shift and change so will the
alphabet in order to adapt to spoken discourse. However, it should not be
forgotten that the alphabet was only invented once, and despite the minimal
changes that can be found nowadays in the analogous versions of Indo-European alphabets,
they all come from that same starting point that over the centuries have ended
up being used in places where those first inventor could not possible imagine,
creating a beacon of multicultural solidarity that still supports to certain
degree inter-linguistic intelligibility for its users.
References
Anglo-Saxon runes.[Image]. (2008). Retrieved April 30,
2012, from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anglosaxonrunes.svg
Arabic
alphabet. (2012). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/31666/Arabic-alphabet
Arabic
alphabet. [Image]. (2012). Retrieved April 30, 2012, from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Flicker-Arabic_Alphabet.jpg
Briggs, H. (2006, Septmeber 14).
Oldest new world writing found. BBC News. Retrieved
from
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5347080.stm
Cardona, G. R. (1994). Antropología
de la escritura. (p. 35). Spain: Gedisa.
DeFrances. (1989). Visible
speech: The diverse oneness of writing systems . Honolulu, HI:
University of Hawaii Press.
Fischer, H. G. (1992). El origen de
los jeroglíficos egipcios. In W. Senner (Ed.), Los
orígenes de la escritura (pp.
65-71). Mexico City, Mexico: Siglo veintiuno
editores.
Greek alphabet. (n.d.). Retrieved
April 30, 2012, from:
http://greece.mrdonn.org/alphabet.html
Henzi [Image]. (2007). Retrieved April 30, 2012,
from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hanzi.svg
Man, J. (2000). Alpha beta.
(p. 17). London, England: Headline book publishing.
Map of fertile cresent [Image]. (2011).
Retrieved April 30, 2012, from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_fertile_cresent.svg
Mason, W. A. (1920). A history of the art of writing.
(pp. 337-344). New York, NY: The
Macmillan Company.
Moorhouse, A. C. (1961). Historia del alfabeto.
(pp. 183-198). Mexico City, Mexico:
Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Newfound Olmec script.[Image]. (2006). Retrieved April
30, 2012 from:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5347080.stm
Ogg, O. (1971). The 26 letters.
(pp. 45-47). New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company.
Petrie, W. M. (1900). The royal
tombs of the first dynasty. London, England: Egypt
Exploration Fund. Retrieved from
http://archive.org/stream/cu31924020551267
Phoenician alphabet.[Image]. (2007).
Retrieved April 30, 2012, from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Phoenician_alphabet.svg
Roman Alphabet.[Image] (1979). Retrieved April 30,
2012, from:
http://www.goines.net/Poster_art4/poster_85.html
Sampsom, G. (1990). Writing systems: A linguistic
introduction. (p. 78). Stanford, CA:
Stanford
University Press.
Spurkland, T. (2005). Norwegian runs and runic
inscriptions. Woodbridge, England:
Boydell &
Brewer.
Thompsom , T. (1942). The abc of our alphabet.
(pp. 28-43). London, England: Balding &
Mansell.
[1] A record-keeping device of the Inca Empire
consisting of a series of variously colored strings attached to a base rope and
knotted so as to encode information, used especially for accounting purposes.
[2] Writing typified by the use of characters formed by the arrangement of
small wedge-shaped elements.
[3] Egyptian hieroglyphs, Demotic (the writing of ordinary life) and Greek
[4] A single symbol representing an entire morpheme, word, or phrase, as
for example the symbo
[6] A branch or subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic family
of languages that includes Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, and such ancient
languages as Akkadian and Phoenician
[7] Today’s Israel,
[8] There were two distinct versions of the Phoenician alphabet; the Moabite
or Tyrian; and the Sidonian. The two were used side by side in different
section of Phoenicia for centuries.
[9] Eastern Greek alphabet
[10] Western Greek alphabet
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