A history of alphabets from around the world

The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering by Frederic W. Goudy Chapter 1: The Beginnings of the Alphabet* F ALL THE achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. "Letters, like men, have now an ancestry, and the ancestry of words, as of men, is often a very noble possession, making them capable of great things": indeed, it has been said that the invention of writing is more important than all the victories ever won or constitutions devised by man. The history of writing is, in a way, the history of the human race, since in it are bound up, severally and together, the development of thought, of expression, of art, of intercommunication, and of mechanical invention. * The author of The Alphabet advances no claim that in "The Beginnings of the Alphabet" he has presented any new facts. As his own particular line of study starts at the point where our roman letter forms came in to existence, it seems desirable to touch briefly on the earlier history of those forms, accepting and using the conclusions of scholars, since he himself has neither the facilities nor the scholarship necessary to a successful study of Assyrian, Babylonian, or Egyptian picture writings and their development. The chapter is intended only to cover briefly the means of recording thought prior to the beginnings of Greek and Latin writing. The author acknowledges here his indebtedness to the writings of Sir Edw. Maunde Thompson, Professor Petrie, Professor Breasted, Canon Taylor, Edward Clodd, Dr. Budge, Wm. A. Mason, and others for many suggestions. The chapter is merely his stepping stone by which he attempts to reach a point where his own field of study begins - the designing and use of letters themselves. When and to whom in the dim past the idea came that man's speech could be better represented by fewer symbols [to denote certain unvarying sounds] selected from the confused mass of picture ideographs, phonograms, and their like, which constituted the first methods of representing human speech, we have no certain means of knowing. But whatever the source, the development did come; and we must deal with it. To present briefly the early history of the alphabet requires that much collateral matter must be disregarded and a great deal that is omitted here must necessarily be taken for granted; the writer desires, however, to present what seems to him to be a logical and probable story of the alphabet's beginnings. Although it has not yet been proved conclusively, it is quite possible, and altogether probable, that the traders of Phoenicia and the Aegean adopted both the use of papyrus and Egyptian hieratic writing, from which developed the Phoenician alphabet. Whether all the earliest writing systems of different countries sprang from one common stock of picture writing, we shall, perhaps, never surely know; we do know that the picture writing of Egypt exercised a very great influence, and it seems quite safe for us to assume that crude attempts by those ancient Nile-dwellers to express thought visibly or to record facts by a series of pictures - or by diagrams sufficiently pictorial, at least, to connect them with well-known objects [disregarding the earlier mnemonic stage or use of memory aids like the quipu or knotted cord, of which the rosary is a modern example - constitute the origin of the abstract and arbitrary signs or symbols which we call "letters." Let us assume, as logically we may, that picture writing in which a drawing depicting or suggesting the object itself came first; next must have come the ideograph, the sign suggesting the name of the object represented instead of representing the thing itself; & next the phonogram, or sign that suggests a sound only. Continue to page 2

Sign up for our weekly newsletter Email: The Alphabet and Elements of Lettering by Frederic W. Goudy Introduction What Letters Are Letters in General The Development of the Roman Capital Letters Before Printing The National Hands The Development of Gothic The Beginnings of Types The Qualities of Lettering Some Practical Considerations Notes on the Plates Greek alphabet Hebrew alphabet Sign language alphabet Cherokee alphabet Russian alphabet Phonetic alphabet Braille alphabet Egyptian alphabet Cyrillic alphabet Aramaic alphabet Morse code alphabet Runic alphabet