The Origin and Varieties of the Semitic Alphabet

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Excerpt from The Origin and Varieties of the Semitic Alphabet: With Specimens Writing was probably neither an invention nor a sudden discovery. In Egypt ¿ourished the art of drawing, and in Egypt was spoken a language largely mono syllabic. In these two facts, alphabetic writing found a natural genesis. It was play and art to an Egyptian to draw outline figures of common objects, and an act of simple intelligence to perceive that combinations of these pictures made words and phrases by the mere short names of the objects pictured. The very children could read much without learning to spell. From the customs of the language it was to some extent natural to use the picture symbol of a syllable for a sign of its initial sound alone. Hence, at a' very early time in Egypt, a limited number of picture characters in addition to a complex system of syllables and ideographs had become commonly agreed on as signs of the various simple sounds, both conacu ants and vowels, and constituted a real and quite complete phonetic alphabet. This appears in innumerable inscriptions and records of all kinds. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.