| Show brkl r too nero AIM 11 1 ky ka 6 i the turks learn a new alphabet Pre prepare parM by 1 alia national S society slety lety P 0 great mystery ol of the alphabet TIIU the most important it intellectual tool that mankind ever invented seems nearer f solution as the ua e result of the recent digging up tip of tablets with a new sort of cuneiform inscription at nas has hamara on the coast ot of syria at the eastern and of the mediterranean son ben the tablets have not yet been deciphered but it lias has been determined that they are written in 28 characters which seems to indicate tho the use of a real alphabet the part that alphabets play piny in tho the life of a people Is indicated by the change la in turkey not many months ago from the arabic to the latin alphabet the decision of turkey to throw overboard the site she had find used tor for many centuries and to replace it with the alphabet of western europe and the Amer lens was not so revolutionary a step as it at first appeared at t was not as if turkey were uprooting some cherished cultural growth and setting up in its place a foreign substitute no true alphabet can bo be found in use today by a people who has bus originated it when it cornea comes to alphabets all the world has borrowed it Is an amazing thing but the problem of resolving human speech into its thirty odd sounds and representing them Vs b symbols seeing to have been only once within historic times nt at least east and from this happy bitof analysis and invention nil all the true alphabets in use today appear to lave descended the english alphabet came directly from the latin it Is in fact the same came alphabet that home used save for such minor changes as the adal addition of a separate J the latin 1 I served for fop both 1 I 1 and i and the expansion of the latin UV b into the romans in turn borrowed their alphabet from the greeks changing the forms of the letters 6 somewhat cihat and dropping some characters character m and the greeks as evidence and tradition show chow took their letter cyst system cal from the rhoen phoenicians Phoenicia telang ns even retaining the names with slight variations greeks greek added the vowels in passing the alphabet through their hands tho the greeks gave it one of its most important additions they added definite vowel symbols to the phoenician alphabet which consisted solely of 22 consonants the greeks tinkered further with the alphabet so BO vint the athenian version including vowels canie came to have 21 01 2 1 letters they also changed the direction of writing the phoenicians Phoenicia ns wrote from right to left the greeks adopted the left to right direction now employed by all the western world the greatest problem in connection with the alphabet Is to determine where the phoenicians Phoenicia ns got it it there have bave been widely divergent theories as to this it has been v variously suggested that the 22 cil characters arac were adopted from the hieroglyphics and the hieratic writing of egypt tile tho cuneiform characters of babylon and symbol cr ff of the ilia cretans caetans Cre tans and ancient greeks no evidence so far found seems sufficient to determine tills this matter probably tile tho most generally accepted theory Is that the phoenicians Phoenicia ns familiar because of their trading voyages with the various cumbersome writing systems around the mediterranean chose from thern them such much symbols as they needed stripped off the complications and simplified writing for fop the first time to a nearly truo true alphabetic basis the phoenicians Phoenicia ns are supposed to have been urged to this step by the desire to conserve time in keeping their accounts and records of trading ventures pictures and symbol the earliest written records were made in pictures which represented things and actions abstract ideas could be suggested only in the crudest roundabout round about way after centuries of use these pictures became convention 1 seized into symbols such as the ideo grums grams of the egyptians and the mayas of america and some of those still vord in china today the next step was a marked departure from the previous development and a tremendously important one it was to represent by symbols not the things themselves but instead the sounds bounds of the epolet ep olei ei words tile the first time ninn man wrote life ills lim iago na s lio lie spoke it ilia sounds of entire words were symbolized at first then after a while tle the syllables which formed formal tho the words this Thle gave a writing system or of considerable fluency in it were written tho the ChI chinese classics with an admixture of the older ideo idea graphs and symbols whis this syllable writing appe appeared anred in ft a purer form in ilia cuneiform of mesopotamia from froin records in iii which ti the a modern world lias has learned of the intimate dally daily lives of those people of long ago their business tran transactions their highly developed laws and their religious customs in eg egypt t s syllable writing wilting was early developed but to the end the egyptians mixed with the syllable characters aalthe all alio lumber of hieroglyphics and ideograms Ideo grams tile egyptians even took the final step of adopting symbols for letter sounds but these too they jumbled in with the other varied characters tho the ultimate inep in splitting up tip the syllables adopting an alphabet ot of characters to represent present le the component sounds of speech arid and building all ah written words from tit those ase simple characters ans taken by tho the phoenicians Phoenicia ns heretofore it has haa been beed believed that this step sted was about 1000 11 0 Iti accords cords of about 1400 B 0 discovered in tha various countries of the eastern mediterranean disclose no alphabetic writing the alphabetic non cuneiform was then in general use even in correspondence between egypt and babylon alphabet born bom about 1000 P D C Record t about 13 0 allow the phoenician alphabet in use and apparently patently ly in use usa for some time the tha birth birthrate date of the alphabet therefore was taken ro roughly na as about 1000 B 0 the latest discoveries at ras shamara however point to the origin ot of alphabetic writing in syria as early as the thirteenth century 13 0 the resolving of writing into the alphabetic form was somewhat like sciences analysis of ni matter atter first students accepted matter itself then found it to be composed of mo molecules le cules they pushed their analysts further and resolved tho the molecules into atoms and these finally into electrons post positive and negative tile the vowel anil and consonant sym symbols bots last to be discovered may amny be considered the positive and negative electrons of written language seldom existing apart from one another when alphabets came into existence in the near nast kast their use spread rapidly largely through trade channels before many centuries they were adopted in ili northern africa tile entire mediterranean region arabia mesopotamia armenia and persia some students have asserted that the brahma alphabet of india originated independently but others are convinced that this alphabet too was introduced trod from syria the home of the phoenicians Phoenicia ns about 13 a 0 even the runic alphabet of tile norsemen norseman Nor semen la is believed believe to have been developed from a greek alphabet early in the christian era the aradean alph alphabet was developed from the phoenician on the edge of the arabian desert and from tills this grew the hebrew and arable alpha bets when the mohammedan re religion began to spread in the seventh century A P it took with it the arable arabic alphabet this accounts for the use of the arable arabic characters today over a large part of southern asia and northern africa it was vas when they became moslems that the turks began the use of the arable arabic alphabet while that system of characters had find been developed by the arabs to fit their own language with great exactness it has haa never been well adapted to the turkish language the latin alphabet now adopted by the turks records their language sounds bounds more satisfactorily and in addition contains about one third as 03 many characters as the arable arabic the number of the arable characters Is swelled by the lie use rise of different forms of each letter ut at tho beginning of words within them and as terminal letters educators believe that heavy beavy illiteracy in n turkey has been due largely to the complexity or of the arabic alphabet and nd that school children can call become wal ft alt new alph alphabet ln in a small fraction of 0 the time devoted to mast masterone master erine lne the old |
