Show owe alphabets to sa s1 sign 9 n systems Phenic ians formed characters from symbols first used in egypt new york those who have become surfeited sur felted with the crossword cross word puzzle but are still tn ili tile alie grip of tile tho word juggling complex need not despair ot of new fields to conquer there la Is stilt open to them the possibilities lit contained in the letters of tho the alphabet according to dr frank 11 managing editor of funk Wag nalls new standard Stan Stand daid attl dictionary it la Is humanly impossible to assel assemble lible all ail tile tho combinations which the letters of f tile the alphabet are capable of forming those 20 letters lie says can bo transposed times if the entire population of 0 the world were to be put to the task it could not write all the possible trans positions of those these 20 26 letters in 1000 years even though they wrote 40 pages a day each page containing 40 different transpositions trans positions 11 with the alphabetical nativity of boine words worda indexed in the catalogue of ills mind doctor Is an authority on oil alphabets past tind and present and as a lexicographer lie digs most assiduously into languages in search of their roots ignorance concerning the alphabet we use la Is surprisingly common tie remarked recently seldom a oay day goes by but what I 1 receive a R score of inquiries concerning some soma branch of alphabetical lore one of the beliefs still general accepted for example Is that we owe our alphabet to t the I 1 L Pheni clAn legend shattered greek mythology credits the alie invention of tho the alphabet to Ca caninus dinus tile the but neither lie he nor any other invented tile the alphabet for it Js Is not a thing that would have occurred spontaneously in its entirety to the mind of any man no matter how great a creative genius man may be no one likes to be termed an iconoclast but it la is certain that lim manucl do de rouge was one when in 1859 U lie ile shattered the legend that our alet alphabet bet was invented by the and proved that the derived their characters from the H gy atlan hieratic symbols its as shown by tile papyrus which was in all probability written before 2000 B 0 the dl discovery covery in 1887 88 of the tablets of asiatic correspondence written by amenophes IV in ili syria about 1375 showed that thousands of years ago the he and other semitic people used babylonian as the language ot international communication the egyptian litera hieratic tic characters are at least 2000 years older than tiny any of the Pheni clan inscriptions of which we have any knowledge professor flinders put forward the theory that a sign system was the original means of international comment cation on the mediterranean littoral f from om early times and that from tills this sign system our alphabet was selected and grouped by the Pheni clans other scholars have sought the source some of the alphabet in the island of crete and some of them cheru hold that bretan inscriptions are identical with hieroglyphs anti that tho the manuan pictography pictographs contain prototypes of the letters our our journey toward the letters was haq 1 a 1 painfully slow one for wo we used a of to express our ideas and by degrees progressed to runes and these runes we termed fu thore the name being derived from tile the six els letters feoli ur thorn horn os es rad rahl the runic alphabet the runes nrc are said to have been taken from tile tho greek alphabet like those of thrace lo in tile the sixth century 13 C the earliest extant mens tire are of the second and third century they passed out of use with the spread of the roman noman alphabet from the rie nth to the fifteenth century the original meaning of the word nine Is secret and it was used to signify a mysterious song doctrine speech or writing there were several runic alphabets the gothic the anglian Ang llan and the scandinavian from the clearest and from the simplest of those early alphabets wo we have derived all the modern systems of writing and after the alphabet displaced the runes it superseded the greek the square letter of tile the hebrew the decorative sanskrit tile the beautiful of the arable arabic speak ins ing world and may be salt said to prevail everywhere it Is only within recent sears in fact since the establishment of angora as the turkish capital that letters have by decree decicc superseded the alphabet in turkey antiquity of cuneiform system the stelo stele of king of moab which was found at in 1868 rind Is more popularly known as tile the stone belonged to the ninth century B 0 tills contains one of the earliest inscriptions in the chin alphabet and its language the new standard dictionary tells us differs only dialectically from the Ife hebrew brew by studying the fragments of tills stone clemmot gagneau was wag able to publish the text and the first translation ind and the decipherment of tile he entire stone which Is now complete was the result of researches by 1 rench french german and english scholars sch olirs yet another the code of ethics of hammurabi king of Babylon la from 2240 B C to 2185 which was dincov ored in 1002 1902 Is in cuneiform characters the cuneiforms are said to have been invented by the primitive ac callans of mesopotamia about years ago and were impressed or engraved by the ancient babylonians As syrians and others on bronze glas glam iron stone clay and other substances sub stances the most important of these sig narles or alphabets are 1 the Acca dlan which Is if the oldest its ch characters a r a aters being ideographic 2 the assero ass ro babylonian tho the largest and most comell bated which lias has characters partly alphabetic partly syllable and written from left to right 3 the new cuslan 4 the old arslan ilaw Pr dan which had bad about sixty phonetic characters and which when deciphered by grotefend in 1802 provided a clew to other cuneiform systems and 6 5 the ar nien nientai tan the shape of the file characters charac tera was governed by the tool or stylus used to produce them the greeks adopted the alphabet before they embarked on their preat great colonizing movement a thousand housand years before christ at they wrote from right to left after the Ilien lelan plan then alternately from right to left and left to right in this fashion the laws of solon were written t but the plan was abandoned in the fifth century and till tho left to right method adopted by occidental nations tile the alphabet was broil brought to italy by the dorian greeks of kumao anti and stelly sicily ail and there it was subjected to further furt lier modification tile the latin ak at chabet retained retain cil the anti and koph it anti and n q arid and dropped theta plit phi and chi kal tile the romans did not require aspirate sounds and later they dropped zeta which was replaced by g a tion of c which they used for both k and K g sounds and so continued with 21 letters until the latin alphabet spread through roman conquests necessitated an increase of live five letters bringing the total up to 20 these included the development of 0 I 1 into j of u into w v and y and the addleton add addition liton of z the one european language that did not ket get its alphabet in tills this manner Is the russian Itus whose characters like that of its ita people are derived from the byzantine greek of tile the ninth century to tills cyril added other outliers S to cover cliver slavonic sounds and an thus increased the number to 35 letters vary in number of letters tile alphabets of different nations vary in ili the numbers of letters they all ay contain for instance there are W 18 letters in ili the arable arabic alphabet and 33 in the armenian 82 32 in tile the coptic 20 in the dutch 20 in the english 25 in ili the french 80 39 in ili the georgian geor 20 26 in tile e german 24 in the greek 22 in tile the hebrew 21 in the italian 23 in the latin 45 in the persian carsee 1 11 arsee or zend 85 35 in the russian 49 in tile the sanskrit 40 in slavonic 27 in the spanish including the di graphs eh ch it 11 rr 22 in tile the japanese syl eyl labary or list of characters representing syllables or syllable syllabic sounds consists of 72 of these sounds which are indicated by 48 characters the chinese are arc much more progressive and resorted to of which they have about but no alphabet in the book of ezra chapter 7 verse verge 21 you have a biblical verse in which there are all the letters of the alphabet except j but the letter j to Is merely a modification of I 1 and both were considered one and the same letter in medieval writing in english the graphic separation of I 1 and j dates back to only the seventeenth century but long after that the two letters were considered identical and treated tre a ted accordingly in the of words in the dictionary even all aa late as a century ago words in I 1 and J were alphabetized among one another by todd in his edition of johnsona dictionary A lover of words once made up his mind to test the recurrence of the various letters lettera of the alphabet in a set number of citations taken from fugl fugitive pieces and containing in all am letters with the following results A occurred 85 times B 10 16 C 30 1 I 44 B n F 25 0 17 11 54 04 1 I 80 J 4 K 8 L 40 31 N SO 80 0 80 11 37 17 0 5 it 62 8 80 T 00 V U qi 34 V 12 W 20 X 4 Y 20 and Z 2 tills this showed that the letter e occurred most frequently arid and therefore Is almost an indispensable letter but it Is not altogether indispensable as the following lines which do not contain the letter e will show A A jovial swain should not compla lt ls of any buxom fair who mocks his pain and thinks think it if gain to quiz hl his awkward air quixotic bobb b ayr allo look for joys joy qu quixotic I 1 bot I 1 6 haz hazards ds run rui A lass annoys with trivial toys opposing man for tun fun that you can do dp without a thid verse will serve to show t tonight my crengle one the flower flo hearing bearing amra tree trea doth long with fragrant moan to meet the lovi lov lip of the honeybee honey bee cut not the amra tree can long lone to greet the bee at evening light with halt half the tha deep ford love I 1 long to meet my norma hero here tonight |