Language. 911 



the sign for house. An egg signified a child or son ; a face meant be- 

 fore ; the front half of a lion was used to signify the beginning, and 

 his latter end (hind' quarters and tail) meant the end. (Rawlinson. ) 

 The pictures of things gradually degenerated from true representations 

 to mere conventional s} T mbols. Later, these s^'mbols, or degenerated 

 pictures, became letters, each symbol standing for the first sound ut- 

 tered in pronouncing its name. The Egyptian names of the letters 

 would naturall}' be the same as the objects the pictures were made to 

 represent in the first place. But when the Phenicians took the Egyp- 

 tian alphabet, they gave the letters new names drawn from their own 

 language, much as our nursery books rename them for the children's 

 benefit, as A stands for apple, B stands for berry, C stands for cow, &c. 

 In the Phenician, A stands for aleph (bull), B for beth (tent), G for 

 gimel ( camel ), D for daleth ( door ), &c. By renaming them thus, the 

 connection between the letter considered as a picture, and its name, was 

 lost. The letter A never resembled a bull, nor B a tent. The Pheni- 

 cian mem was the new name for M. Mem means water. The Egyptian 

 name was mulak, an owl, and originally was a picture of an owl ; but 

 all the bird disappeared in the course of time, except its two ears, rep- 

 resented by the two upright points of the letter, and the beak, shown in 

 the middle downward point. l 



The course of the evolution of writing has imitated more or less 

 closely the evolution of speech. Writing is, in fact, a sign language, 

 an attempt to reduce all the expressions of the brain to visible signs, 

 while spoken language is an attempt to reduce them all to audible signs. 

 Originally, the expressions are mixed audible and visible, the latter be- 

 ing a species of writing in the air (gestures). In the development of 

 spoken language we may first attribute the ground-work or basis to the 

 principles of onomatopoeia and the imitation of natural sounds, includ- 

 ing our own automatic interjectional expressions, &c. Next, there 

 would be added words expressive of action, which words would be new 

 adaptions of those already in use. 



Language is the expression of conditions produced in the brain by 

 external stimulations. It began at a time in the history of the race 

 when mental conditions were of the most simple and rudimentary kind ; 

 before involved, general, or abstract ideas could have been developed. 

 Words that express such ideas, therefore, could not possibly have been 

 among the first to come into use. 



Philologists attribute the origin of the great body of words to a com- 

 paratively very small number of roots. This is undoubtedly correct. 

 But in trying to ascertain which words are roots, it is extremely easy to 

 make a mistake and get the cart before the horse. As ideas grow from 



1 Isaac Taylor, " The Alphabet." 



