Show TR US all 9 ir I 1 ta 4 1 the turks learn a new alphabet prepared by tie national ge society washington IX CA C great mystery of the alie alphabet THE Tp the alie most important intellectual n tel tool that mank mankind d ever invented seems nearer so solution u as the result of the recent digging up of tablets with a new sort of cuneiform inscription fit at ras shamara Sli amara on the coast of syria at the eastern end of the mediterranean sea the tablets have not yet been deciphered but it has been determined that they are written in 28 characters which seems to indicate die ate the use of a real alphabet the part that alphabets play in the life of a people is indicated b by y the change in turkey not many months ago from the arabic to the latin alphabet the decision of turkey to throw overboard oer board the alphabet slie she had used for many centuries and to replace it with the alphabet of western europe and the americas was not so revolutionary a step as it at first all appeared it was not as if turkey were uprooting some cherished cultural growth and setting up in its place a foreign substitute no true alphabet can be found in we lice today by a people who has originated it when hen it comes to alphabets all the world has borrowed it is tin an amazing thing but tile problem of resolving human speech into thirty odd sounds and representing them by symbols seems to have been solved only once within historic times at least and from tills this happy bit of analysis and Inen mention indention tion all the true alphabets in use today appear to have descended the english alphabet came dl di erectly from the latin it is in fact the same alphabet that rome used save for such minor changes as the addition of a separate J the latin 1 I served for both 1 I and J and tile lie expansion of the latin UV into the romans in borrowed their alphabet from tile the greeks changing the forms of the letters somewhat and dropping some characters and the greeks as evidence and tradition show took their letter system from the phoenicians Phoenicia ns even retaining the names annies with slight variations greeks added the vowels in passing the alphabet abrou through b their hands the greeks gave it one of its most important additions they lidded added definite vowel syllables to the phoenician alphabet which consisted solely of 22 consonants the greeks tinkered further with the alphabet so that the athenian version including vowels came to hai awe e 21 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 ernp employed loyed by all the western world the greatest problem in connection with the alie alphabet Is to determine where the Phoenicia ns got it there have been widely div divergent theories as to tills this it has been arlou sly suggested that the 22 characters were adopted from the hieroglyphics MI and the liSe hier ralle atle writing in E egypt agypt tile the cuneiform characters rs of babion Hi bilon and symbols of tile the Cle clemins tIns and ancient greeks no evidence so far found seems sufficient to determine tills this matter probably the most generally accepted theory Is that the Phoenicia ns familiar because of their trading voyages with the vu vit alous cumbersome writing systems around the mediterranean chose chos from them bliem such symbols as they needed stripped of the complications and simplified writing for tile he first time lime to a nearly true alphabetic basis the phoenicians Phoenicia ns are supposed to have been urged to tills step by the desire to conserve time in keeping in their accounts and records of trading ventures it Is to the bustling bueding impatient rabbits babbits of more than years ago therefore that la in world probably owes the device that has made possible the great advances in literature and science and practically all of tile the continuing of civilization pictures and Sym symbols bats wo we take tahe tile the alphabet and oil all these words that are built from it with which to record the shadings sha dinga of our mear ideas so touch us as a matter of course that hint it Is difficult to rea realize that for thousands thotis aids and perhaps tens of thousands of years ninn nian lind had no better method of recording ills his thoughts than ieli n jumble of picture tu re writing symbols such as our dollar align or the ideography ideographs Ideo graphs of tile the chinese and syllable characters sucu such as biose of ue the japanese the earliest written records were made in pictures pic lures 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 conventionalized into symbols such as the ideograms Ideo grams of the egyptians and the mayas of america and some of those still used in china today the next deit step was a marked departure from the previous development and a tremendously important one it was to represent by symbols not the things themselves ies but instead the sounds of tile the spoken words for the first time man ills his language as he spoke it the sounds of entire words were symbolized at first then after a while the syllables which formed the words this gave a waiting system of considerable fluency in it were written the chinese I 1 classics with an admixture of the older ideographs ideography ideo graphs and symbols tills syllabic writing appeared in a purer form in the cuneiform of mesopotamia from records in which the modern world has learned of the intimate daily lives of these people of long iong ago their business transactions their highly developed laws and their rell religious ious customs in egypt syllable syllabic writing was early developed but to the end the egyptians mixed with the sellable characters all the lumber of hieroglyphics and ideograms Ideo grams the egyptians even took the final step ol of adopting symbols for letter sounds but these too they jumbled in with the other varied characters the ultimate step in splitting up the syllables adopting an all alphabet of characters to represent the component sounds of speech and building all written words from these simple characters was taken by the phoenicians Phoenicia ns heretofore it lias has been believed that tills this step was taken about 1000 B C records of about 1400 B C discovered in the various countr countries les 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 about 1000 B C records of about B 0 show the phoenician alphabet in use and apparently in use for some time the bith date of the alphabet therefore was taken roughly ns s about 1000 B 0 the latest discoveries co at ras Sha shamaon Sli amara marn however point to the origin of alpha alphabetic beff writing in syria as early as the Thir thirteenth tenth century B C the reselling of writing into the alphabetic form was somewhat like sciences le n c C s a analysis Y s of matter er F first 1 r s t acu acce ste ama ater students d e n t s a accepted p d matter it itself s e 1 f then found it to be composed oi of molecules they pushed their analysis further and resolved the molecules into atoms and these finally into electrons positive and negative the vowel and anso consonant symbols last fast to be discovered may be considered to be the positive and negi negative tive electrons of written language when alphabets came into existence in the near east bast their use kill spread end rapidly hir largely ely through trade channels before anany centuries they were adopted in north ern africa the entire mediterranean region arabia mesopotamia armenia and Il persia ersla some students have asserted that the brahma alphabet of ladin originated independently but others are convinced eliat this alp alphabet lisibet too was introduced from syria the home of the Phoenicia ns about B C kven even tile the runic alphabet of the norsemen norseman Nor semen Is believed to have been developed dei de eloped from a greek alphabet early in the christian era the alphabet was developed from the phoenician on the edge of the arabian desert and from this grew tile hebrew and arable amble alphabets when the mo hammeran ham medao religion began to serl spread ad in ill tile the seventh century A D it took with it the arable arabic alphabet this accounts for tile the use of the arabic amble characters today oer a large part of southern asia and northern africa it was when nhen they hey became moslems that the turks begin began the use ilse of the arabic alphabet while that system of characters had been developed by the arabs to fit their on langi lan gange age with great exactness it has ner been well adapted adi pled to the turkish language the latin alphabet now adopted by the turks records their language sounds bounds moie satisfactorily and in addition contains about ony one elrd as many characters as tile the arabic |