PICTUEE-WEITING AND WOED-WEITING. 103 



If it be granted that there is an amount of resemblance 

 between the letters and their names in the old Semitic alpha- 

 betSj which is wanting in these later ones, it does not follow 

 from thence that the shape of the Hebrew letters was taken 

 from their names. Letters may be named in two ways, acro- 

 stically, by names chosen because they begin with the right 

 letters, or descriptively, as when we speak of certain characters 

 as pothooks and hangers. A combination of the two methods, by 

 choosing out of the words beginning with the proper letter such 

 as had also some suitability to describe its shape, would produce 

 much such a result as we see in the names of the Hebrew letters, 

 and would moreover serve a direct object in helping children 

 to learn them. It is easy to choose such names in English, as 

 Arch or Arrowhead for A, Bow or Butterfly for B, Curve or 

 Crescent for C ; and we may even pick out of the Hebrew 

 lexicon other names which fit about as well as the present set. 



Whatever may be the real origin, syllabic or other, of the 

 Semitic characters, the argument so confidently put forth in 

 the Hebrew grammars is not strong enough for the weight laid 

 upon it, seeing that the coincidences on which it rests may be 

 explained as being not primary and essential, but secondary 

 and superficial. The list of names of letters, Aleph, Beth, 

 Gimel, and the rest, is certainly a very ancient and interesting 

 record ; but its value may He not in its taking us back to the 

 pictorial origin of the Hebrew letters, but in its preserving for 

 us among- the Semitic race the earliest known version of the 

 " A was an Archer." 



Mr. Samuel Sharpe has made an attempt to derive the Hebrew 

 letters from Egyptian hieroglyphs, and in his list there are cer- 

 tainly two letters, both also belonging to the Coptic supple- 

 ment, namely, / and sh, which run through the whole series of 

 hieroglyphic, hieratic, Phoenician, old and new Hebrew (in Yau 

 and Shin), in very similar forms, a point which deserves careful 

 investigation.! With respect to these speculations, however, it 

 may be suggested that, though it is likely enough that the 

 Jews or Phoenicians may have got the art of writing from the 

 Egyptians, whose possession of it is proved to go back to so 



' Sharpe, ' Egyptian Hiei'oglypliics ;' London, 1861, p. 17. 



