Blair Collection > Kelt or Gael

xrnician
alphabet.
The Kelt or Gael. 27
restricts them to three — the Phoenician, the
Japanese or Chinese, and the Aztec or Mexican.
The Egyptians invented and perfected a
picture language, and developed it to the hiero-
glyphic stage. At that stage it acquired a sacred
character and stopped. The Phoenician, who was Ph
always irreverent, took the Egyptian hieroglyph,
or sacred symbol of an idea or thing, and adapted
it to the symbol of a sound, and so made an
alphabet. The general idea is that the West
got, not only the thing, but the name of alphabet
from Greece, from the names of the two first
letters, alpha, beta. That was not so. Greece
got the letters and the names from the Phoenician
letters aleph, beth.
The Chinaman invented a picture language, Chinese or
and developed it to the hieroglyphic stage, where ■ ^p^"^^^-
it also stopped. The Japanese took the symbol
and made it phonetic, and gave us the Chinese
or Japanese alphabet. The Assyrian borrowed
from the Turanian and Phoenician, using both.
The Aztec went through the three stages Aztec,
himself.
The Chinese alphabet is now confined to the
Turanian branch of the human family, and the
Aztec has died out ; the Phoenician serves all
other branches of writing men.
The Phoenician, in adapting the Egyptian Phcemcian
symbol to sound, adapted it to his own Semitic "^^
sounds, and no doubt the symbols expressed the
sounds fully. But it does not follow that they