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The Alphabet Tree Dren’S Puzzles

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The Alphabet Tree Dren’S Puzzles TUGboat, Volume 26 (2005), No. 3 199 A major intellectual step was the invention of Philology the rebus device. This is where the sounds cor- responding to pictograms are combined to form a word. We have all come across these, often as chil- The alphabet tree dren’s puzzles. For example, a picture of a bee Peter Wilson plus a picture of a tray can represent the word ‘be- tray’, or more obscurely a picture of a bee plus a 1 Introduction picure of a female deer can stand for the word ‘be- We got from via Akn and ’ k n to hind’. Even a single pictogram can suffice; for in- XPD stance a pictogram of the sun can be used for both ` k p A K N, and and @ ¼ à in only about 2000 the words ‘sun’ and ‘son’. Consequently symbols years. This is a short story of how that happened can be created that just stand for sounds and then and how we know what the strange symbols mean, they can be combined to form words. This can a k n a k n e.g., and . The fonts in all the markedly reduce the number of symbols required for examples were designed for use with TEX, especially a full writing system. Symbols representing sounds by humanities scholars, and are freely available. are called phonograms. Phonetic writing requires 1.1 Writing systems few glyphs. In these writing systems, the glyphs represent sounds. All writing systems are a com- The earliest known writing is from Sumeria dating bination of phonetic and logographic elements but from about 3400 bc. In some other places the earli- the proportions of these two elements vary among est writings discovered date from: Egypt in 3000 bc, languages. Ideographic scripts essentially have one the Indus Valley in 2500 bc, Crete in 1900 bc, China glyph for each word, and this usually represents the in 1200 bc and Central America in 600 bc. These meaning of the word, not its pronunciation. The all looked very different. arabic numerals 1, 2, . are pronounced in English It seems that initially writing was used for bu- as one, two, . but in German as eins, zwei, . even reaucratic purposes — keeping accounts, recording though the meanings are identical. Mixed systems goods and so on — and a limited writing system was are where some signs are ideographic and others are sufficient for this. Later, to record the great deeds phonetic. For example, in English 1st, 2nd, . , of the rulers and especially their names, to promul- are ideograms with a phonetic component so that gate their laws, and to meet the needs of the reli- we read them as first, second, . instead of onest, gious establishment, writing would be extended to twond, and so on. a full writing system: a system of graphic symbols, Although it does have some phonetics the Chi- or glyphs, that could be used to convey any idea. nese script is principally logographic; this may be At that point literature became a possibility. All because of the Chinese language itself. Spoken Chi- writing systems represent speech in one form or an- nese consists almost entirely of one-syllable words other. Some glyphs represent sounds while others and there is a limit on the number of short sounds are semantic signs that represent either words or 1 that the human voice can make; the Chinese use concepts; these are called logograms. something like 400–900 sounds. Many sounds, there- It appears that early writing systems followed fore, have shared meanings — homophones. In spo- the same general progression. The first actual writ- ken English the meanings are deduced from the con- ing was pictographic or iconographic where a simple tex and in writing by their spelling. For example: picture designated a real object — a drawing of a ‘Pare me a pair of pears’. In spoken Chinese homo- deer represented a real deer, for example. Gener- phones are partly distinguished by using four lev- ally the pictures were very simple and abstractions els of pitch (thus increasing the number of different of what we might think of as a drawing. A stylised word sounds to some 3000), and by context. In writ- picture is called a pictogram. ing there is little possibility of reducing the number Gradually the pictures were formalized and also of glyphs required to represent the vocabulary from began to be used to represent relationships and ideas that of an ideographic script. Chinese and Japanese as well as objects. This is called ideographic writing. use the same ideographic script although their lan- For example, a picture of the moon could represent guages are very different. the idea of night or darkness as well as that of the At the other end of the spectrum, the Finnish moon itself. A symbol standing for an idea is a and French systems are much closer to pure pho- semantic sign and is called an ideogram. netics, with some logographs; that is, the phonetic values of the set of glyphs is closely matched to the 1 From the Greek logos = word. 200 TUGboat, Volume 26 (2005), No. 3 sound of the spoken language. In the English writ- soon after hieroglyphs and was initially the Egyp- ing system the alphabetic glyphs, a–z and A–Z, rep- tian everyday business script. The demotic3 script resent sounds, the ‘?’ mark represents an idea and came much later, around 650 bc, and was then used glyphs like ‘$’ represent whole words (which can also as the everyday script. The priests, though, contin- be spelled out as ‘dollar’). ued to use the hieratic script. From the several thousand characters that an Unlike hieroglyphics, which failed to spead be- educated Chinese or Japanese needs to know, the yond Egypt, cuneiform writing became popular and English speaker only needs to know 26 (52 if you in- was taken over by the Babylonians when they con- clude both uppercase and lowercase). Monolingual quered the Sumerians in 1720 bc. Chinese and Japanese can read and understand each There is evidence that there was a writing sys- other’s scripts because they are based on the same tem in Crete about 3000 bc. A thousand years later ideographic system, even if they can’t understand a syllabic script called Linear A was in use, and each other when speaking. Monolingual French and by about 1800 bc this had been replaced by the English for example, with their alphabetical writing Linear B syllabic script which was used for writing systems, are not in this happy situation; they can Mycenean Greek. read each other’s scripts but with no understanding By about 1500 bc, Egyptian hieroglyphs in- of either the written or spoken words. cluded ‘alphabetic’ glyphs alongside all the others. Phonetic scripts can be roughly classified into The Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform script dates from two major kinds. about 1300 bc. • In a syllabic system a glyph represents a syl- 1.2 The alphabet lable, usually a consonant followed by a vowel (CV) but can be a VC pair or a consonant vowel Although it may never be possible to describe ac- consonant (CVC) triple. curately the origins of the alphabet, scholars are generally agreed that most of the world’s alphabets • In an alphabetic system a glyph represents ei- are descended from one that was probably invented ther a vowel or a consonant, again with two sub- about 1600 in the Middle East. This was a divisions. In some alphabetic systems, like He- bc Semitic alphabet, where Semitic refers to a linguistic brew, only the consonants are denoted, whereas family that ranged between the Sinai in the south, in a full alphabetic system, like French, both along the Mediterranean coast, north through Asia consonants and vowels are fully represented. Minor and east to the Euphrates valley; the Canaan- By about 3200 bc the Sumerians were using a ites and Phoenicians, among many others, spoke a cuneiform (wedge-shaped) script. They lived in the Semitic language. Fertile Crescent in the area of the Tigris and Eu- As people travelled, particularly as conquerors phrates in what is now the Middle East. The Sume- or merchants, the original alphabet was dissemi- rians had over 2000 ideograms. Following their dis- nated geographically and gave rise to several alpha- covery of the rebus device they eventually reduced betic branches. Roughly speaking, in the time pe- the number of glyphs in their script to about 600, riod 1400–1100 bc, these were Archaic Greek; Old which included both semantic glyphs and phono- Hebrew which led to Samaritan; Phoenician; and grams. The Sumerians wrote on clay tablets using South Arabic scripts which in turn led to Amharic, a stylus to impress the marks. Drawing on clay is via Ethiopic, and other obscure scripts like Thamu- not easy, which must have given them an impetus to dic and Lihyanic. With only minor exceptions these move away from pictograms towards ideograms and scripts were used for writing languages from the then on to phonograms. Indo-European family. All are interesting in their 2 The Egyptian hieroglyphic writing system de- own right, but the most relevant script for us is the veloped roughly in parallel with the Sumerian sys- Phoenician which is the direct ancestor of not only tem. The Egyptians, though, wrote on papyrus with our modern Latin alphabet but also of many other a reed brush or pen, or painted on the walls of tombs. alphabets and scripts in use today. Figure 1 shows Drawing with these implements is much easier than the main descendants of the Phoenician alphabet. scratching pictures in clay and thus they did not At the earliest time there was no fixed direction have such a great need to move towards phonograms.
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