514 ORIENTAL ELEMENTS OE CULTURE IN THE OCCIDENT. 



consists the culturiil value of phonetic or letter writing? It is not, as 

 many assume, in facilitating the reading, for psychophysics has experi- 

 mentally established the fact that we, no less than the Chinese, read 

 not letters but wordy. Moreover, anyone can easily convince himself 

 of this by the inaliility to at once read fluently a .sentence in an entirely 

 foreign language." 



The circumstance that we read words explains the tendency to revert 

 to ideographic writing which we can observe in all cursives and espe- 

 cially in the name chiti're whose dissolution into their letter constitu- 

 ents must be foregone. This is the only excuse for the mischief called 

 orthography, which greatly nullities the use of the invention by com- 

 pelling us to express the same sound through diti'ercMit signs, as in 

 German v and f and ditierent sounds through the same sign, etc. Still, 

 even in English, wdiere a ditierent vowel from the one meant is fre- 

 quently written, letter witing has considerably simplitied and fac-ili- 

 tated the acquisition of reading, and that means the spread of culture. 

 Its effect also reaches beyond the limits of nationality and age, and, 

 finallv, only through it could printing with movtil)li^ type have become 

 eti'ective. To be sure, our writing is phonetically still far from perfect. 

 The forms should in the tirst place indicate the articulation, and similar 

 processes, such as modulation and aspiration, should he ex|)ressed h}^ 

 the formation of the letters themselves; further development of the 

 sounds is conceivable which would render the writing simpler and 

 more practical. 



The invention of the letter alph:il)et which we owe to the practical 

 sense of the Semites, and which was not essentially modified through 

 the Classical and Christian Germanic culture periods, is such an 

 important achievement that its historical aspect is worth consid- 

 eration. To the spread of the Semitic alphal)et in the regions 

 known as its home, the find of Tell-el-Amarna furnishes the furthest 

 limit in time, for as it proves that cuneiform writing was then in 

 such exclusi\'e use in Canaan that even the Canaanitish glosses 

 are expressed in this cumbersome script, a Semitic consonantal writ- 

 ing could hardly have existed there prior to 1400 B. C. ^' The iloso 

 relationship between the writing of the Moabite Stone (840 B. C.) and 

 the old-Aramean monuments of Senjirili (eighth century B. C.) seems 

 to establish a conmion origin which we can not well push back Ijeyond 

 the eleventh century B. C. I see, therefore, no cogent chronological 

 arguments against the recentlj' asserted hypothesis of the innnigration 



«The Greek avcxyiyvcodKEiv (properly, to recognize again) expresses, therefore, 

 more correctly the process than the Latin " legere" and the German " lesen," which 

 represent only the elementary phase of reading if legere suggests the collecting of 

 the single letters and dvayiyvchdKEiv the recognizing of whole words. 



^Compare JJdzbarski, op. cit. 



