26 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



of a monosyllable, which is normally made up of two elements, a 

 consonant and a vowel, as in the Devanagari, and other syllabic 

 systems. 



Lastly, by dropping the second or vowel element the same 

 symbol, further modified or not, becomes a letter representing the 

 sound w, that is, one of the few ultimate elements of articulate 

 speech. A more or less complete set of such characters, thus 

 worn down in form and meaning, will then be available for indi- 

 cating more or less completely all the phonetic elements of any 

 given language. It will be a true alphabet, the wonderful nature 

 of which may be inferred from the fact that only two, or possibly 

 three, such alphabetic systems are known with absolute certainty 

 to have ever been independently evolved by human ingenuity 1 . 

 From the above exposition we see how inevitably the Phoenician 

 parent of nearly all late alphabets expressed at first the conso- 

 nantal sounds only, so that the vowels or vowel marks are in all 

 cases later developments, as in Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Greek, 

 the Italic group, and the Runes. 



In primitive systems, such as the Egyptian, Akkadian, Chinese, 

 Maya-Quiche and Mexican, one or more of the various trans- 

 itional steps may be developed and used simultaneously, with 

 a constant tendency to advance on the lines above indicated, by 

 gradual substitution of the later for the earlier 



Hieroglyphs 



and Cunei- stages. A comparison of the Akkadian cuneiform 



forms. ... . . . 



and Egyptian hieroglyphic systems brings out some 

 curious results. Thus at an extremely remote epoch, say 6000 

 years ago 2 , the Akkadians had already got rid of the pictorial, 

 and to a great extent of the ideographic, but had barely reached 

 the alphabetic phase. Consequently their cuneiform groups, 



1 Such instances as George Guest's Cherokee system, and the crude attempt 

 of a Vei (West Sudanese) Negro, if genuine, are not here in question, as both 

 had the English alphabet to work upon. A like remark applies to the old 

 Irish and Welsh Ogham, which are more curious than instructive, the 

 characters, mostly mere groups of straight strokes, being obvious substitutes 

 for the corresponding letters of the Roman alphabet, hence comparable to the 

 cryptographic systems of Wheatstone and others. 



2 " We discovered written records no less than 6000 years old, and proved 

 that writing and civilisation were then by no means in their infancy." (J. P. 

 Peters, Expedition to Babylonia, &c., Vol. I. Philadelphia, 1897.) 



