1885.] NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 85 



sound: a, be, ce, de, etc. A detailed description of the Phoeni- 

 cian alphabets is not necessary for our purposes here. Suffice it 

 to say that a few years ago a link between the PhoMiician and 

 Egyptian was found in tlie inscription of Mesha, King of Moab, 

 Avho is mentioned in the Bible (2 Kings iii. 4). This inscrip- 

 tion, though not purely Plicenician, presents the oldest form of 

 the Shemitic alphabet now existing. Although it is about seven 

 hundred years younger than the probable introduction of the 

 Egyptian alphabet into Piia3nicia, still the similarity between 

 the two is very striking, as well as the gradual development of 

 the letters in the Pliosnician stem itself. As it seems, no fixed . 

 laws governs the changes in the letters, but the general tendency 

 is to simplify letters by leaving out lines or rounding off cor- 

 ners. 



The Phoenicians soon spread this godsend among the nations 

 of the Mediterranean Sea. It reached the Greeks and Latins at 

 about the same time. The Greeks adopted the alphabet in the 

 very same order as the Phronicians. Still, as the Greeks had 

 some sounds that were wanting in the Phoenician, and found 

 many in the Phoenician which they did not have, they took the 

 forms of the letters, but gave to some of them a different sound. 

 Thus the fifth letter was H in Egyptian and Hebrew, while the 

 Greeks turned it into E; the sixth became a digamma, and was 

 afterwards dropped; the eighth, CH in the Egyptian and He- 

 brew, a very rougli aspirate, was used to represent the heavy 

 long e (or y, eta); the fifteenth, S in Egyptian and Hebrew, be- 

 came a S (xi), our X, since the Greeks "found so many S-sounds 

 in the Phoenician that they could not make use of all; the six- 

 teenth, the strange Shemitic guttural sound, resembling some- 

 what our short o, became 0; the eighteenth, a TZ in Egyptian 

 and Hebrew, was dropped, while the nineteenth, K or Q, in 

 Egyptian and Hebrew, was only used in ancient inscriptions. 

 The Greeks then added T, 0, X, W,fl{iipsilon, phi, chi,2}si, and 

 omega). The npsilon, as is now conceded by all philologists, is 

 the only pure Greek letter, while the rest are double or com- 

 pound letters: phi = P + H, chi = K + H, psi = P + S, 

 omega = + 0. 



The result of our investigation so far is that the order of the 

 primitive alphabet is retained, the forms of the letters remain, 

 while some sounds change. When we pass to the Latin, we find 

 a few more changes. While the ancient inhabitants of Italy 

 seem to have received their alphabet direct from the Phoenicians, 

 still later in Rome, Greek influence helped definitely to form the 

 letters. The Etruscan, Oscan, Umbrian, and Faliscan letters 

 read from right to left, which points to an early reception from 

 abroad, just as in ancient Greek inscriptions the lines read alter- 



