DEVELOPMENT OF THE ALPHABET 



sound. This reduced the hitherto complex mechanism 

 of writing to so simple a system that the inventor must 

 have regarded it with sheer delight. On the other 

 hand, the conservative scholar doubtless thought it 

 distinctly ambiguous. In truth, it must be admitted 

 that the system was imperfect. It was a vast im- 

 provement on the old syllabary, but it had its draw- 

 backs. Perhaps it had been made a bit too simple; 

 certainly it should have had symbols for the vowel 

 sounds as well as for the consonants. Nevertheless, 

 the vowel-lacking alphabet seems to have taken the 

 popular fancy, and to this day Semitic people have 

 never supplied its deficiencies save with certain dots 

 and points. 



Peoples using the Aryan speech soon saw the defect, 

 and the Greeks supplied symbols for several new sounds 

 at a very early day. 8 But there the matter rested, 

 and the alphabet has remained imperfect. For the 

 purposes of the English language there should certainly 

 have been added a dozen or more new characters. It 

 is clear, for example, that, in the interest of explicit- 

 ness, we should have a separate symbol for the vowel 

 sound in each of the following syllables: bar, bay, 

 bann, ball, to cite a single illustration. 



There is, to be sure, a seemingly valid reason for 

 not extending our alphabet, in the fact that in multi- 

 plying syllables it would be difficult to select characters 

 at once easy to make and unambiguous. Moreover, the 

 conservatives might point out, with telling effect, that 

 the present alphabet has proved admirably effective 

 for about three thousand years. Yet the fact that 

 our dictionaries supply diacritical marks for some 



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