THE ORIGINS OF THE ORDER OF THE LETTERS

David Diringer

Nowadays, in the whole civilized world much simpler it is to use 22 or 24 or 26 signs alphabetization is a normal thing. Every only 1 Also, the may be passed from library has a catalogue,in which the names one language to another without great diffi of the authors—and the subject-matter—are culty; the same alphabet is used now for ordered alphabetically, and not only accord English, French, Italian, German, Swedish, ing to the first letter of the name (or of the Dutch, Polish, Welsh, Finnish, Hungarian, subject-matter) but also according to the and others, and has derived from the alpha second, third, fourth letter, and so on. In bets once used by the ancient Hebrews, deed, alphabetization dominates all lists of Phoenicians, Aramaeans, Greeks, Etruscans, names, all dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and— and Romans. needless to say here—all indexes. Thanks to the simplicity of the alphabet, How far back does this generally accepted writing has become very common; itis no convention go? In comparison with the his longer a more or less exclusive domain of the tory of mankind, and even with the cultural priestly or other privileged classes, as it was development of Man—itself a relatively re in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia or China. cent event—fully developed alphabetization Education has become largely a matter of has been in use only from, say, yesterday. reading and writing, and is possiblefor all. It is, of course, based upon the fixed order of The fact that alphabetic writing has survived the letters. But when did this letter-order with relatively little change for three and a come into existence? There was certainly half millennia, notwithstanding the rela no letter-order before the existence of the tively recent introduction of printing and alphabet. the even more recent introduction of the The alphabet is the basis of modern civil typewriter, as well as the extensive use of ized writing, but it hasnotalways been so. shorthand-writing, is the best evidence of its Indeed, the alphabet is the last system of suitability to serve the needs of the modern writing, though the most highly developed, world. It is this simplicity, adaptability, and the most convenient, and the most easily suitability which have secured the triumph adaptable. There is an enormous advan of the alphabet over the othersystems of tage, obviously, in the use of letters which writing. represent single sounds rather than objects, The story of the alphabet from the end of or ideas, or even . No sinologist knows all the 80,000 or so of the existing the second millennium b.c. until today is, on Chinese symbols, but itis also far from easy the whole, not very hard to trace, though to master the approximately 9,000 symbols many details and the exact origins of some actually employed by Chinese scholars. How scripts are still uncertain. It is its pre- and proto-history that is still wrapped in obscur *1Tie text of an address given to the Society on ity. The chief problem, still partly unsolved, 25th April, 1968. is that of its origin.

54 Since classical times, this problem has When, by whom, and where was the been a matter of serious study. The Greeks alphabet invented? We may date the origin and Romans held five conflicting opinions of the alphabet about 1800-1700 B.C., that is, as to who were the inventors of the alpha about the beginning of the Hyksos period. bet: the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the The nationality of its inventors is unknown, Assyrians, the Cretans, the Hebrews. In but it is now generally agreed that they be modem times, various theories, some not longed to the North-West Semitic linguistic very different in part from those of ancient group (comprising the Canaanites, Early days, have been current. Each country situ Hebrews, Phoenicians, and Aramaeans). ated in, or more or less near to, the eastern Palestine and Syria, the geographical centre Mediterranean has been seriously regarded of the greater Egypto-Mesopotamian civil as a claimant to this great honour. Of all ization, offered conditions favourable to the the theories, the Egyptian (with a number invention and elaboration of alphabetic of variants) has enjoyed by far the most writing. Moreover, the (Semitic) language popular reception. spoken in this region was particularly fav All these theories are based mainly on the ourable to the creation of a consonantal similarity of the symbols, which in time be alphabet. came the letters of the alphabet. As a matter The original, North-Semitic, alphabet re of fact, however, the great achievement in mained almost unaltered for many centuries. the creation of the alphabet was not the Moreover, if we ignore the external form of invention of the symbols—ample evidence the letters, and consider only their phonetic can be adduced for the' invention' of alpha value, their number, and their order, we bets by schoolchildren who already know may regard the modern Hebrew alphabet as their ABC—but the inner working principle. a continuation of the original North-Semitic This in its simplicity was the production alphabet; created more than 3,500 years ago. of a system in which each sound was repre The main characteristic of the North-Semitic sented by one sign and one sign only. The alphabet is that it consisted of 22 letters or inventor of this system must, indeed, have symbols, which correspond roughly to the been a very fine phonetician. For this first 22 letters of its offspring, the Greek achievement, simple as it now seems to us, the alphabet. But the 22 letters expressed con inventor is to be ranked among the greatest sonants only, though some of them came to benefactors of mankind. No other people be used as long vowels. The absence of in the world has been able to develop a true vowel-signs has not been satisfactorily ex alphabetic system of writing. plained. One theory is that the vowels were It was this alphabet which became the supplied locally, the sound given varying ancestor of all alphabetic scripts the world with the different dialects; in other words, has known. Each civilization developed its the inventors left the vowels to be supplied own variation on the basic script, and the according to local custom. It is pertinent to passage of time has made the inter-relation note how in English the same word is pro of some members of the same family quite nounced differently in different parts of the unrecognizable. Thus, the — country, this being due rather to the varied the great mother-script of the hundreds of methods of pronouncing vowels than to those Indian and Further-Indian writings—, the of pronouncing consonants. Korean alphabet, the Mongolian It is highly probable that the twenty-two are derived from the same source as the symbols of the original alphabet were not ancient Greek and Latin, the Runic, the pictographic—as is commonly assumed—but Hebrew, the Arabic and the Russian alpha artificial and geometrical, and their names bets, although it is practically impossible were an artificial mnemotechnic device. In for a layman to see a real resemblance be deed, though the value of each consonant is tween them. the value of the first letter of its name (& of

55 beih, g of gimef, d of daleth, etc.)—this prin is proved by these facts: (1) The shapes of ciple being known as acrophony—it would nearly all the Early Greek letters clearly be wrong to assume that it necessarily indi recall their Semitic origin; (2) the phonetic cates the use of pictorial representations of value of the great majority of the Early the objects whose names the letters bore. Greek letters was the same as that of the Thus, the was not * an ox's head on its Semitic letters; (3) the order of the Greek side \ the beth not a * house', the gimel not letters corresponds—with a few understand a ' camel *, and so on. The adoption of the able exceptions—to the order of the Semitic names was, it seems, a device similar to those letters; (4) the direction of writing in the of modern ABC-books for children, in which Early Greek script, and in the derivative (of course, independently of the form of the Etruscan script (also in the early Latin in letter) A stands for ' aeroplane' or * acorn' scriptions), was from right to left, as in the or ' apple'; B for * bunny' or * bee' or ' but Semitic; (5) the letter-names: whereas the terfly'; C for 'cat' or 'coat' or 'candy' Greek names are meaningless in Greek, the and so on. Semitic letter-names are generally words As to the letter-order, the order of the in the Semitic languages. Hebrew letters is the same as that of the Much more difficult is the chronological original North-Semitic alphabet. That this problem, but inferences—there is no direct is so can be proved by reference to acrostics evidence—point to about 1000 b.c. as the in Psalms xxv, xxxiv, ad, cxii; Prov. xxxi, time of the introduction of the Greek alpha 10-31; and Lament, i-iv. Moreover, on the bet. Through its direct and indirect descend last day of the excavations at Lachish (in ants, the Etruscan and Latin alphabets on 1938) by the Wellcome-Marston Archaeolog the one hand, and the Cyrillic alphabet on ical Expedition to the Near East, a school the other, the Greek has become the pro boy's scribbling was found on the vertical genitor of all the European alphabets. In face of the upper step of the staircase which the course of its long history, it had many led up to the Palace; it included the scratch other offshoots (in Asia Minor and Africa; ing of the first five letters of the Early as well as the Gothic alphabet). The Hebrew alphabet in their conventional order. Etruscans, a highly civilized people and the The inscription probably belongs to the late ancestors of the modern Tuscans, in Central ninth or early eighth century B.C. and is the Italy, were the predecessors of the Romans. first example of the Hebrew alphabet being The earliest of the over ten thousand learnt systematically. Etruscan inscriptions is the Marsiliana Tab The order of the letters of the North- let (of the eighth century B.C.), which is the Semitic alphabet gives an appearance of earliest preserved Western ABC. phonetic grouping, but this may be acci The Greek-Etruscan alphabet became the dental. The meaning of the names seems to ancestor of the Latin, but the Romans affect the arrangement. adopted only 21 letters; the ancient zeta was We move now to the West: out of the dropped and was replaced by a G (by adding troubled darkness—which shrouded the a bar to C), but in the first century b.c. (after transition from the Mycenaean civilization, the conquest of Greece) the symbols Y and of the Late Bronze Age (in the twelfth cen Z were adopted for the transliteration of tury b.c), to the Early Greek primitive geo Greek sounds, and were placed at the end of metric art of the Iron Age (tenth-ninth cen the alphabet The subsequent history of the tury b.c.)—there came the remarkable consisted essentially in the invention of the Greek alphabet, the earliest external transformation of the single letters, fully-developed alphabetic system of writing, especially in the cursive or current styles of containing both consonants and vowels. The writing. The monumental alphabet re North-Semitic origin of the Greek alphabet mained practically unaltered and in late is accepted by all serious scholars. The origin medieval times was taken over for die mod-

56 Figure 1. Oldest extant example of the Early Hebrew ABC. The letters are (from left to right) e, b, g, d, h.

Figure 2. Development of the Alphabet from the North-Semitic of c. 1000 B.C. to modern capitals

57 em majuscules. In the Middle Ages there Thus, the three-and-a-half-millennial was some further change: the signs U-V history of the alphabetic letters has been were differentiated and W was added; also concluded, and the present text is a very- /-/ were differentiated. short summary of this history.

Figure 3. Etruscan inscription—the Marsiliana Tablet The earliest preserved Western ABC, probably belonging to the eighth century b.c.

Acknowledgments are made to Dr. Diringer and to the publishers for permission to reproduce Figs. 1 and 2 from his Writing (Thames & Hudson) and Fig. 3 from The alphabet in the history of civilisation (Hutchinson).

WORLD INDEX OF ated by the Organization for Economic Co operation and Development. SCIENTIFIC TRANSLATIONS It is in two parts: (1) an alphabetical listing The first annual cumulative volume, com piled by computer and covering available of journal articles and patents translated at a great variety of kinds of places, and (2) a translations from non-western languages re list of perodicals translated cover-to-cover, lating to science and technology that have abstracted publications and periodicals con come to the attention of the European taining selected articles. Translations Centre, situated at Delft, in 1967, was published in May. It is the most The price is U.S. $25. It can be obtained comprehensive list of this nature that has through any bookseller, or direct from the ever been published and is a product of a E.T.C., Doelenstraat, 101, Delft, The Neth wide scheme of voluntary co-operation initi- erlands.

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