The Beginnings of Alphabets

Young Henry Rawlinson, dangling from ropes along the face of a cliff in Persia, copied a 60-foot cuneiform inscription King Darius had ordered chiseled there around 500 B.C. For the next 12 years, Rawlinson, a mid-nineteenth century British scholar, and others labored to crack the puzzle of cuneiform. At last they were able to read the linguistic conglomeration. The key to the first real writing system had been found.

About 50 centuries before Rawlinson’s work, the ancient world began to see its first cities. As the complexities of urban living increased, frequent misunderstandings between merchants, traders, and religious leaders led to the need to write down information.

There are differing opinions as to why people felt the need to write. Some authorities think religion was the motivation. Others think that economics, the need to keep track of business transactions and inventories, was the reason for the beginnings of writing.

Early shipping records were kept on clay tablets. Cuneiform evolved from these beginnings in Mesopotamia as early as 3100 B.C. At first, impressions of tokens were pressed onto clay “envelopes.” Later, symbols of the things to be itemized were scratched on flat clay tablets. Eventually, a squared-off stick was used to press wedge-shaped marks into the clay. Thus, the name cuneiform—from the Latin for “wedge.”

About the same time, the Egyptian form of writing was developing. The Pharaohs must have enjoyed the “game” of reading. Reading hieroglyphics could be compared to several modern games combined: Some symbols were like puns in that they pictured a homonym (sun = son). Some were like a rebus, illustrating syllables (bee + leaf = belief). Phonograms used a picture for each letter of the word (cat + apple + rabbit + leaf = Carl). Fish and fowl used a picture to classify a word (cat = animal). Some pictures indicated a related idea (sun = daylight) as in the game of Clue. Others were to be taken literally (sun = sun), as in true picture reading.

Scholars tried to figure out this writing system after it had been “dead”for 1500 years. Finally, in 1822, Jean Francois Champollion, a French scholar, compared the Rosetta Stone and an obelisk inscription identifying the various reading games of the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

As time passed, these great early civilizations of the Bronze Age began to fade, and the eastern Mediterranean area then became the crossroads of the ancient Western world. The constant flow of merchandise, cultures, and writing systems demanded an easier way of writing. The first true alphabet was developed by Semitic people in this area between 1800 and 1300 B.C. For the first time, symbols representing single speech sounds constituted the whole of the writing system. This is the essence of an alphabet.

The original Sinaitic and Phoenician alphabets recorded only consonants, as the Semitic languages did not need to write vowels. However, Greek could not be read with consonants alone, so the Greeks chose some Semitic consonants to represent their own consonants and used the extra symbols for vowels. The idea of writing vowels, which came from the Greeks, has had as much impact as anything else they gave us.

The Roman alphabet, which you are now reading, was developed by the Etruscans. They dominated the Italian peninsula before the Romans came into power, bridging the time from the Greeks to the Romans. Borrowing from the Greek alphabet, the Etruscans chose certain letter shapes and changed a few sound values for writing their own language.

The Romans, in turn, took over the Etruscan alphabet for writing Latin and passed it on to all Western European languages. Indeed, most of the peoples Rome conquered had unwritten languages. But with the spread of Christianity came the need to translate the Bible into other languages, and alphabets needed to be developed.

With the fall of Rome, Western Europe lapsed into illiteracy. Learning retreated to the monasteries, where monks spent endless hours hand-copying books. Writing became chaotic. One monk could not read what another had written, but copied it anyway.

Charlemagne was very concerned about this trend. In 781 A.D. he invited Alcuin of York, an English scholar and churchman, to come and help. Alcuin’s work in literacy probably did more to reverse the direction of the Dark Ages than any other event of his time.

Meanwhile, Eastern Europe began to seek its own alphabets. Mesrop Mashtotz tried desperately to fit other alphabets to his language, Armenian. Mashtotz wanted to strengthen Armenia, the first “Christian nation,” against other religions and preserve ethnic unity. Finally, he “received the alphabet in heavenly vision.” Mashtotz and Bishop Sahag then translated the Bible and set up schools.

Prince Rostislav of the Slavic-speaking Moravians (central Czechoslovakia) sent a message to the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople: “We don’t understand Latin or Greek. Please send us someone to teach us in our language.”

The emperor sent two Greek brothers who knew Slavic. Two alphabets emerged. One fell into disuse, but the Cyrillic alphabet continues to be used widely. In the Soviet Union alone, more than 200 million people, representing more than 100 languages, use the Cyrillic alphabet.

And what of southwestern Asia? Aramaic, which had one of the earliest alphabets, became the common language of the vast area from Egypt to India as a result of the Assyrian and Persian conquests of the Arameans. As these people were resettled by their conquerors, they took their alphabet with them. The Aramaic alphabet replaced other scripts and became the parent of most writing systems in the area, including Arabic.

The Arabic and Roman alphabets are cousins, descendants of their North Semitic grandfather. Like shorthand, Arabic is an efficient way of writing. All styles are cursive, geared to rapid penwork, and most vowels are not written. Certainly, Arabic is one of the most important alphabets in today’s world, used by about 950 million people. After the Dark Ages, the European Renaissance resulted largely from the discovery of Europe’s literary roots which were preserved in the Arabic alphabet and language at major Islamic centers.

Many scholars feel India’s alphabets were also developed from the Aramaic alphabet—as a result of sea trade between Babylon and India (800-600 B.C.). The Brahmi alphabet makers analyzed their spoken language by charting the positions of the mouth as it moved in speech, noting location and manner of speech sound production. They assigned a letter to each sound.

Panini of India had a passion for listening to people around him and gathering illustrations of the use of language. Following in the steps of the Brahmi alphabet makers, he became the most renowned of grammarians. Though he lived sometime between the seventh and fourth centuries B.C., it was not until the discovery of his work by nineteenth-century Europe that linguistic science in the West was born. He is known as the “father of descriptive linguistics.”

Africa is home to a third of all the world’s languages. For over a thousand years, the Tuareg camel caravanners dominated the trade routes of the Sahara. They are descendants of the Numidians, who in the second century B.C. adopted the alphabet of their Phoenician conquerors, adding some of their traditional symbols as letters. They could write either right to left or bottom to top. Today the Tuareg people are adding vowels and reversing the direction of the original Tifinagh alphabet.

Africa has hundreds of tonal languages. In these, as in all the other tonal languages of the world, not only the consonants and vowels, but also the pitch of the voice distinguishes words.

Most of the original alphabets had letters to represent only consonants and vowels. Many tonal languages require tone to be written as well. This can be complicated.

For example, the Dan people of Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) had an intense desire to read their own language, but few could because the tones were not written.

Margrit Bolli, a linguist with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), struggled to find a solution for writing contour tones. Accent marks could not be used because both French, the national language, and Dan use them for vowel qualities. “How about numbers?” Bolli wondered. The people called it a “mathematical nightmare.” The Dan considered the use of extra letters like q, j, and x a “language from Mars.” Finally, everyone agreed on punctuation marks before and after syllables. A pleased reader said, “Those marks are like road signs to tell us which way to go.” Now thousands read and write Dan, and the system is official for other languages as well.

Eastern Asia also has writing systems uniquely designed to fit their special needs. The Korean alphabet is one of the most scientific ever created. King Sejong (A.D. 1397-1450), by naming his alphabet Hun Min Jong Um, “Accurate Sounds (letters) to Educate the People,” stated his purpose in making it. He invented new shapes for the letters, revealing in them profound linguistic insights. They were pictures of the parts of human anatomy that form speech—teeth, tongue, lips, cheeks, and throat. It is an excellent alphabet that represents the sounds of the spoken language and does so in an unusually systematic way.

Sejong wanted an easy way to write Korean so that all Koreans could be literate. However, other Korean men of learning opposed the alphabet because it was not like the Chinese they had traditionally used. Consequently, Sejong’s alphabet was largely ignored until almost the twentieth century. Then the use of the alphabet for Bible translation helped popularize it. It is now official in both South and North Korea.

Emperor Fu-Hsi (2852-2738 B.C.) is the legendary inventor of the Chinese script. His was a pre-writing device made up of straight and broken lines said to be taken from the marks on a turtle shell. Chinese writing is the oldest system in the world today, having changed little in 4000 years. The characters are not symbols for individual sounds, as alphabet letters are, but for whole words, as if each word were pictured. It is a logographic or word-writing system.

Why would an alphabet not work for Chinese? First, the difference between Chinese dialects is as great as that between the French and Spanish languages. With an alphabet, Chinese would be written differently in each area. But the nonalphabetic writing system unites speakers of all Chinese dialects.

Second, Chinese has many homophones, like the English to, too, and two. Most Chinese words sound like several, or even dozens, of other words. Since alphabets represent words by their sounds only, they have difficulty writing distinctively words that sound alike. But the Chinese system is ideally suited to handle homophones because the writing distinguishes both meaning and sound.

Third, an alphabet is ideal for writing languages that have small changeable parts of words, as in write, unwritten, writer's, and so forth. But Chinese words do not have changeable parts. Chinese grammar works by adding and rearranging words rather than by changing or adding parts of words. So the logographic system with unchanging symbols for whole words is fitting.

Modern Japanese is the most complex major writing system in use today. Its basis is the Chinese, which came via Korea in the fourth century A.D. Kanji, whole Chinese characters chosen for their meanings, are used in writing Japanese root words (nouns, adjectives, and verbs). Kana, abbreviated Chinese characters chosen for their sounds, are used in writing Japanese forms which cannot be written by kanji.

Sequoyah, a North American Cherokee Indian (c. 1765-1843), though illiterate, created a writing system. Convinced that the white man’s power lay in the written language, he determined to provide the same for his people.

How would one write his own language? By making a picture of each one of thousands of words? Sequoyah tried that. He drew symbols with pokeberry juice on chips of wood. But his wife, angered by his neglect of the family, threw the chips into a fire. Sequoyah decided to try a new method.

He noticed that just a few recurrent groups of sounds (syllables) combined to form numerous words. After 12 years of hard work, he completed a set of 85 symbols. Next he had to convince the tribal elders it would work. He taught his young daughter, Ah-yoka, to read and write. Together they carried out a demonstration. Sequoyah left the house while Ah-yoka wrote what the skeptical elders dictated. When Sequoyah returned and read what she had written the elders were dumbfounded, and then ecstatic. Their own language could be written!

Literacy caught on like wildfire among the Cherokee. Within months they were able to read and write in two languages (English and Cherokee), and a steady stream of literature poured from their own printing press.

The ancient writing systems of Mexico and Central America remain inadequately deciphered. However, their number systems and astronomical systems are well understood. The Mayans perfected a calendar round, a device that worked like three interlocking cogwheels of different sizes. Three cycles of 13, 20, and 365 days were correlated. The calendar was central to Mayan planning for agriculture, religious rituals, and community affairs. It was more accurate than the Julian calendar of the Spaniards.

Many writing systems do not fall into the specific category of alphabets. The first written symbols of any kind were numbers devised to record inventories and business dealings. Number symbols, called numerals, are ideographic: one symbol per concept. Today’s place value mathematical system originated in India. The number zero was invented to hold the place so that a number like 3030 was not confused with 33. The Arabs in Spain adopted the system in the ninth century AD. and it spread throughout Europe. Without this invention, the industrial and scientific ages might not have been possible. The place value system is more widespread than the alphabet.

Other special writing systems include Braille for the blind and hand signing, the alphabet by which the deaf can “hear.” The use of alphabet letters for writing music is another example of the many ways in which letters function. However, the earliest musical notation was written in cuneiform on a clay tablet circa 1400 B.C.

“To decipher the alphabet of a dead language is noble; to design an alphabet for a living language is sublime,” Richard Pittman said. Today over 300 million people still do not have a way to write their own language. They represent at least 2000 of the world's spoken languages. Linguists and other supporting personnel with the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) are involved in hundreds of language projects developing alphabets, analyzing the grammar of these languages, translating literature and the scriptures, and encouraging literacy.

Many SIL linguists have encountered unusual situations in their language projects. Frank and Ethel Robbins discovered that the Quiotepec Chinantec people of Mexico do not necessarily have to open their mouths to speak. “Blowing” sounds through their noses communicates as clearly as the commonly spoken words. Also in Mexico, the Mazatecs have developed a “whistle talk.” SIL linguists Eunice Pike and George and Florrie Cowan realized the importance of tone when they heard the Mazatecs carry on sustained conversations by whistling.

The ancient Cham alphabet in Vietnam may be the earliest on the southeastern Asia mainland. The Cham, desiring to preserve their heritage, asked SIL linguists David and Doris Blood to produce literature in their alphabet. They place high value on their language, alphabet, and literature as a tie to their past splendor.

The curiosity that drove Henry Rawlinson to dangle from ropes, the power the Cherokee Indians felt as they read and wrote their own language, the pride the Cham have in their heritage, and the magic of making an intangible spoken language tangible by writing it down are what motivate people all over the world to learn to read and write.