2 MEMOIRS OF THE CARNEGIE MUSEUM 
Mr. Chalfant has with great patience and skill written with his own hand the 
characters which are employed in the text and accompanying plates, which have 
been carefully reproduced by photogravure. 
W. J. Honuann, 
Director of the Carnegie Museum. 
I. ILLUSTRATIONS OF EARLY WRITING DERIVED FROM 
ANCIENT INSCRIPTIONS. 
The study of alphabetic or syllabic languages readily resolves itself into two 
branches: orthography, which concerns the correct use of letters and syllables and 
the history of these phonetic signs; and etymology, which deals with the deriva- 
tion of words and their successive changes in meaning. The fact that the letters 
and syllables as writing-signs have only a phonetic value, and are used without 
reference to their original and inherent significance, causes a distinct demarcation 
between the two branches of philology just mentioned. For example, it is well 
known that our letter A was originally an ox’s head and signified that animal, but 
it does not follow that every word containing the letter A must needs have some 
connection with an ox. 
Turning now to ideographic languages, the case is very different. Here the word 
or symbol is in itself significant of the meaning which it bears. The A still means 
“ox,” when it occurs alone or in combination, and the student must determine what 
relation the accepted meaning of the symbol has to that of the primitive ideogram. 
The Chinese language is in the main ideographic, with a tendency to syllabism 
owing to the infusion of certain classes of signs called “radicals” and “ phonetics.” 
Where the “ phonetic” is purely such, the student need not attempt to reconcile the 
accepted meaning of the complex symbol with that of the phonetic sign, the specific 
meaning of which may be quite foreign to that of the complex symbol in which 
the phonetic occurs.' At the same time it must be remembered that the introduc- 
tion of the “phonetic” 
was at one time a new idea to the Chinese. Once appreci- 
ated, they applied it widely, and where a writer discovered in an old symbol some 
semblance of a newly recognized phonetic, he forthwith altered it to suit the phonetic 
scheme. This recalls the old-time rage in Europe for Latin derivations, which led 
to the Latinizing of familiar Anglo-Saxon words, ¢. g., tongue from A. 8. “ tung.” 
In many instances the Chinese resorted to punning in order to bring a certain 
symbol into the phoneticized class. Such may have been the case in the symbol 
‘An example of this is shown in the sign eal yu = ‘‘park.’? The phonetic B yw means ‘‘have,’’ and here has 
only a phonetic value. 
