PICTURE-WRITING AND WORD-WRITING. 101 



are called king-shing, tliat is, "pictures and sounds.-" In one 

 of the two signs the transition from the picture of the object 

 to the sound of its name has taken place ; in the other it has 

 not, but it is still a picture, and its use (something like that of 

 the determinative in the Egyptian hieroglyphics) is to define 

 which of the meanings belonging to the spoken word is to be 

 taken. Thus a ship is called in Chinese choiv, so a picture of a 

 ship stands for the sound choiv. But the word chow means 

 several other things; and to show which is intended in any 

 particular instance, a determinative sign or key is attached to 

 it. Thus the ship joined with the sign of water stands for 

 chow, "ripple," with that of speech for chow, "loquacity," 

 with that of fire, for chow, " flickering of flame ;" and so on for 

 " waggon-pole," " fluff," and several other things, which have 

 little in common but the name of choio. If we agreed that 

 pictures of a knife, a tree, an 0, should be determinative signs 

 of things which have to do with cutting, with plants, and with 

 numbers, we might make a drawing* of a pear to do duty, with 

 the assistance of one of these determinative signs, for pare, peat, 

 pair. In a language so poverty-stricken as the Chinese, which 

 only allows itself so small a stock of words, and therefore has 

 to make the same sound stand for so many difierent ideas, the 

 use of such a system needs no explanation. 



Looking now at the history of purely alphabetic writing, it 

 has been shown that there is one alphabet, that of the Egyptian 

 hieroglyphics, the development of which (and of course of its 

 derived forms) is clearly to be traced from the stage of pure 

 pictures to that of pure letters. Some few of these interesting 

 characters are even now in use. The Coptic Christians still keep 

 up in their churches their sacred language, which is a direct 

 descendant of the ancient Egyptian; and the Coptic alphabet, 

 in which it is written and printed, was formed in early Christian 

 times by adding to the Greek alphabet certain new characters 

 to express articulations not properly belonging to the Greek. 

 Among these additional letters, at least four seem clearly to be 

 taken from the old hieroglyphics, probably from their hieratic 

 or cursive form, and thus to preserve an unbroken tradition at 

 once from the period of picture-writing to that of the alphabet. 



