120 



WIUTIM;. 



from picture-writing to a phonetic alphabet. We 

 would refer the reader, for further information upon 

 this interesting subject, to the eighth and ninth lec- 

 tures of the above mentioned work of the marquis 

 Spineto ; to which we will add here the remark of 

 professor Stuart, in the translation of Greppo by 

 his son, already cited. He says, " There are some 

 striking resemblances between the Chinese sign? 

 employed in writing and the Egyptian hierogly- 

 phics ; so striking that some have been led to sup- 

 pose that one of these nations must be a colony of 

 the other. It is now well known that the original 

 written characters of the Chinese were imitative or 

 figurative, and that they were few in number. 

 These have, in process of time, been modified 

 and changed, both as to form and use, so that 

 scarcely a restige now remains of their original ap- 

 pearance, and, in some cases, of original usage. All 

 the Chinese writing was originally ideographic ; 

 that is, it resembled the figurative and tropical hie- 

 roglyphic method of the Egyptians. But now, as 

 stated by that excellent Chinese scholar, Abel Re- 

 rnusat, in his Chinese Grammar, p. 4, at least one- 

 half of the Chinese characters are merely phonetic, 

 or alphabetic, in the sense of syllabic. These the 

 Chinese call hing-ching, that is, representing sound. 

 In the next place, the Chinese have an order of 

 characters which they name hoe'i-i and kia-tsie'i, 

 which are designed to express abstract and intellec- 

 tual ideas. These resemble, of course (not in 

 form, but as to use), the tropical hieroglyphics of 

 the Egyptians. Bat, on the other hand, there are 

 some striking differences between the hieroglyphic 

 system of writing and that of the Chinese. The 

 Chinese characters are divided into primitive, or 

 simple, and derived, or composite. Of the first, 

 called siatig-hing, which make the elements of all 

 their writing, there are only about 200 (Remusat's 

 Grammar, p. 1, note 2), while the Egyptian hiero- 

 glyphics amount to more than 800 (Precis, p. 267). 

 The derived or composite characters of the Chinese 

 are exceedingly numerous ; and in these are com- 

 bined two or more simple characters. The com- 

 bination oftentimes is very complex, and not a 

 little difficult for a learner to decipher. These are 

 called hoe'i-i. On the contrary, in Egyptian, the 

 combination of proper hieroglyphics is very rare ; 

 indeed, it scarcely ever takes place, and when it 

 does, it is in such a way that the elements of the 

 combination are preserved entirely separate ; as, for 

 example, in the anaglyphs above described. These 

 striking points of difference serve to show that al- 

 though the figurative hieroglyphics of the Egyptians, 

 and the siang-hing, or original simple characters of 

 the Chinese, were alike (for such must be the case, 

 inasmuch as both were pictures, or imitations of 

 sensible objects), yet, in the course which the two 

 nations respectively chose, in order to represent 

 abstract and intellectual ideas, there was a great 

 diversity ; hence the tropical characters of the 

 Chinese, compounded of the simple ones, and diver- 

 sified to an almost endless extent, are very differ- 

 ent from the tropical characters of the Egyptians, 

 which continued to be simple in their structure, 

 and, in general, incapable of combination. That 

 lisrht may yet be cast on the invention of proper 

 alphabetic signs, from a diligent and extensive col- 

 lation of Egyptian and Chinese characters, and a 

 better understanding of the true nature and history 

 of each, every lover of literature will continue to 

 wish and t'o hope." 



To illustrate another very important step in writ- 



ing, that of expressing grammatical forms by hiero. 

 glyphirs, alluded to in the article Hieroglyphic*, 

 we extract the following passage from the fifth 

 Ln-tiire in Spineto's work: "The marks of the 

 tenders are, a square, cither plain or striated, for 

 the masculine, and half a circle for the feminine. 

 The plural is almost invariably expressed by a sim- 

 ple repetition of the [hieroglyphical] units : to 

 units sometimes is added a quail : all of these stand 

 for the syllable noue, or ove, which is the termina- 

 tion added to the plural: for instance, the word 

 soten signifies king ; and, by the addition of noue, 

 we have so-tenove (kings) ; noyte (god), noytenoue 

 (gods) ; and the like. In regard to the genders, it 

 seems the Egyptians also expressed them by mi- 

 ploying the pronouns of him, of her ; and theM 

 pronouns were represented by the figure of an un- 

 dulating line over a serpent, or over a broken line. 

 In the first instance, the group represented the 

 pronoun his, or of him, which, in Coptic, w;i 

 or nef; in the second instance, the group stood for 

 the pronoun hers, or of her, which, in Coptic, was 

 called nes." These terminations, or an abbrevia- 

 tion of them, if added to hieroglyphic expressions, 

 would make them either of the masculine or femi- 

 nine gender: "For example, the chenalopex, that 

 is, the goose, or the egg, are the phonetic hierogly- 

 phics expressing the word child ; for both of them 

 represent the letter s, which is an abbreviation of 

 the word se, or tse (son, child) : therefore if to the 

 bird or to the egg we add the figure of the serpent, 

 or the broken line, we shall have, in the first in- 

 stance, the group signifying son of him, or his son ; 

 and, in the second, son of her, or her son. The 

 genitive case is expressed mostly by an undulating 

 line added to a group. This hieroglyphic stands 

 for the letter n, and, on those occasions, is taken 

 as an abbreviation of the syllable nen, which is the 

 invariable termination of the genitive case in the 

 Coptic language. The Egyptians distinguished the 

 third person singular of the present tense in the 

 same way as we do in the English language, by 

 adding the letter s to the word, such as he does, he 

 writes. The figure of the serpent, which stands for 

 the letter s, is a mark of the third person singular 

 of the present tense." Champollion has found a 

 number of other hieroglyphics, which exhibit the 

 inflections of verbs ; but they are not yet all ac- 

 curately determined. "The passive participle was 

 represented by two hieroglyphics, the horn and the 

 half circle. The pronoun this was exhibited by a 

 vase and a perpendicular line. The pronoun who 

 or which was represented by a vase and half a circle. 

 Such are some of the principal and most important 

 grammatical forms or phrases." It may be made a 

 question whether phonetic alphabets are all derived 

 from a common source, or whether different na- 

 tions, in the gradual progress of improvement, were 

 led to this great invention without mutual com- 

 munication. If the latter supposition be correct, 

 the similarity of these alphabets in the oldest lan- 

 guages would be owing to the similarity in the 

 minds of men, and in the processes of their deve- 

 lopement ; but in either case, after phonetic char- 

 acters were invented, they would naturally assume 

 a great variety of forms, being merely arbitrary 

 signs. Such we find to be the fact. A consider- 

 able number of ancient alphabets still exist, such 

 as the demotic, hieratic and hieroglyphic characters 

 of the Egyptians, the old Phoenician, Punic, Etrus- 

 can, Greek, Runic, Cuffic, arrowhead characters, 

 and a number of others. The last are also called 



