A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



be known. For aught we know, it may have been 

 some dreamy-eyed Israelite, some Babylonian philoso- 

 pher, some Egyptian mystic, perhaps even some 

 obscure Cretan, who gave to the hard-headed Phoeni- 

 cian trader this conception of a dismembered syllable 

 with its all-essential, elemental, wonder-working conso- 

 nant. But it is futile now to attempt even to surmise 

 on such unfathomable details as these. Suffice it that 

 the analysis was made; that one sign and no more 

 was adopted for each consonantal sound of the Semitic 

 tongue, and that the entire cumbersome mechanism of 

 the Egyptian and Babylonian writing systems was 

 rendered obsolescent. These systems did not yield 

 at once, to be sure; all human experience would have 

 been set at naught had they done so. They held their 

 own, and much more than held their own, for many 

 centuries. After the Phoenicians as a nation had 

 ceased to have importance; after their original script 

 had been endlessly modified by many alien nations; 

 after the original alphabet had made the conquest of 

 all civilized Europe and of far outlying portions of the 

 Orient the Egyptian and Babylonian scribes con- 

 tinued to indite their missives in the same old picto- 

 graphs and syllables. 



The inventive thinker must have been struck with 

 amazement when, after making the fullest analysis of 

 speech-sounds of which he was capable, he found him- 

 self supplied with only a score or so of symbols. Yet 

 as regards the consonantal sounds he had exhausted 

 the resources of the Semitic tongue. As to vowels, he 

 scarcely considered them at all. It seemed to him 

 sufficient to use one symbol for each consonantal 



zoo 



