PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD- WRITING. 99 



move all doubt as to its meaning. Thus tlie letters read as 

 fnti in an inscription^ followed by a drawing of a worm, mean 

 '''worm" (Coptic, /t!»i), and tbe letters Tih, followed by the 

 picture of a star hanging from heaven, mean "darkness" (Cop- 

 tic, T^ake) . There may even be words written in ancient hiero- 

 glyphics which are still alive in English. Thus hhn, followed 

 by two signs, one of which is the determinative for wood, is 

 ehony ; and th, followed by the drawing of a brick, is a sun- 

 di'ied brick, Coptic tohe, tohi, which seems to have passed into 

 the Arabic tob, or with the article, attob, thence into Spanish 

 through the Moors, as adobe, in which form, and as dobie, it 

 is current among the English-speaking population of America. 



The Egyptians do not seem to have entirely got rid of their 

 determinative pictures even in the latest form of their native 

 writing, the demotic character. How it came to pass that, 

 having come so early to the use of phonetic writing, they were 

 later than other nations in throwing off the crutches of pic- 

 ture-signs, is a curious question. No doubt the poverty of their 

 language, which expressed so many things by similar combina- 

 tions of consonants, and the indefiniteness of their vowels, had 

 to do with it, just as we see that poverty of language, and the 

 consequent necessity of making similar words do duty for many 

 different ideas, has led the Chinese to use in their writing de- 

 terminative signs, the so-called keys or radicals, which were 

 originally pictures, though now hardly recognizable as such. 

 Nothing proves that the Egyptian determinative signs were 

 not mere useless lumber, so well as the fact that if there had 

 been none, the deciphering of the hieroglyphics in modern 

 times could hardly have gone a step beyond the first stage, 

 the reading of the kings' names. 



We thus see that the ancient Egyptians and the Aztecs 

 made in much the same way the great step from picture- 

 writing to word-writing. To have used the picture of an 

 object to represent the sou^nd of the root .or crude-form of 

 its name, as the Mexicans did in drawing a hand, ma (itl) , to 

 represent, not a hand, but the sovmd ma, ; and teeth, tlan (tli) , 

 to represent, not teeth, but the sound thin, though they do 

 not seem to have applied it to anything but the wi-iting of 



h2 



