User:Vuara/EVOLUTION OF WRITING

The Greek Alphabet Written by Charlotte P.


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The Greek alphabet came from the Phonecians around the year 900 B.C. When the Phonecians invented the alphabet there were 600 symbols. Those symbols took up too much room on the papyrus, so they narrowed it down to 22 symbols. The Greeks borrowed some of the symbols and then they made up some of their own. But the Phonecians, like other cultures, used their symbols to represent consonants and vowel sounds together. The Greeks were the first people to have separate symbols (or letters) to represent vowel sounds. Even the name "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet -- "alpha" and "beta." All later alphabets came from the Greek alphabet.

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THE EVOLUTION OF WRITING By R. Cedric Leonard


 * http://www.atlantisquest.com/evolution.html
 * http://www.atlantisquest.com/classical.html
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"THE very interesting problem of the 'origins' of writing is shrouded in a cloud of darkness and is as hard to interpret as the 'origins' of art, architecture, religion, and social institutions, to name only a few of the important aspects of our culture." In this statement Dr. I. J. Gelb (1974), Professor of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, is referring to the so-called 'beginning of writing' in the Mesopotamian Valley slightly more than 5,000 years ago (the two tablets shown on the title page are examples). But the true origin of writing may be even more mysterious--and it may have occurred much earlier than commonly supposed.

How did writing began? Most epigraphers and paleographers agree that the historical evolution of writing occurred in basically four stages: 1) Ideographic; 2) Logographic; 3) Syllabic; 4) Alphabetic. It can be seen from this that alphabetic writing is considered the most advanced of the evolutionary stages (Gelb, 1974).

The development of writing is unidirectional. This means that it will pass through the above four stages in that order and no other. No system of writing can begin naturally with the syllabic or alphabetic stage; if such a case did occur, it could only happen if influenced by another system which had already passed through the earlier stages. A writing system can stop at any given stage (a case of arrested development); it can combine stages as it passes from one stage to another; or it can continue to use more than one stage forever. But no writing system ever studied has ever skipped a stage. This observation led Prof. Gelb to an important discovery concerning the Egyptian and Western Semitic systems which will be discussed.

I will describe the four major stages in extremely brief terms.

In the ideographic stage there is absolutely no relationship between what is transcribed and actual speech sounds. It is basically composed of pictures and readily discerned symbols, designed so that the message is obvious. An example is that practiced among the American Indians before the arrival of the Europeans.

The next stage is the logographic (word-sign) in which each written sign stands for a word in the spoken language, and maintains basically a one-to-one relationship to the spoken words. If one wanted to say "tree," he drew a picture or a symbol of a tree. If one wanted to say "three trees," he could either draw three trees, or he could precede the picture of a tree with a numerical symbol having the meaning "three". However, some things are not so easily pictured.

Abstractions, such as life, love, beauty, etc., were difficult to express in this manner. The usual device to overcome this difficulty was the use of homonyms (words with the same sounds). For instance, the ancient Sumerian word for "life" was ti. The same Sumerian word also meant "arrow". It was easy enough to incise an arrow, which could be read as "life" if the context demanded it. This technique of expression is also known as rebus writing.

Proper names presented a greater difficulty. As long as names like White Cloud and Running Bear were used there was no problem. But how do you write down names like Assurbanipal, Shalmanezer or Zephnathpaaneah using a logogram? This led to phonetization.

The next major stage is the syllabary. The principle of phonetization arose when words could not be indicated by mere pictures. This vital step occurred when complex words were "sounded out" using separate signs. Thus each sign represented a single syllable (a consonant followed by a vowel sound). Such a system is known as a syllabary.

With logographic writing thousands of word-signs have to be memorized in order to have a good working vocabulary of the language to be written. Also, over a period of time once easily recognizable pictures become conventionalized to the point where they must be memorized in order to be recognized. In a syllabary the number of signs to be memorized drops to a few hundred.

Even in a syllabary, to delineate each vowel sound following the initial consonantal sound would require a large number of written signs (especially since some syllables also end with a consonantal sound which may be different from the initial sound). But since everyone in a given culture already knows how to pronounce the words, it is possible to eliminate differentiations in vowel sounds with a minimum of sacrifice in accuracy. In such systems, the sound of a or e was understood as standard. Sometimes a few of the leftover signs from the preceding logographic system were retained for use as determinatives. The Egyptian hieroglyphic system, which lasted some 3,000 years, retained a large number of logograms until its extinction.

However, all such 'trimmed down' syllabic systems ran into one common problem: LONG vowels! In the Western Semitic system (Phoenician, Amorite, Hebrew, etc) long vowels were absolutely necessary in expressing plurals. Something had to be done to let the reader know when a given vowel should be long rather than short. The answer was plenic writing. Plenic writing incorporated the use of the so-called "weak" consonants (such a w and y) to substitute for a long vowel sound (usually w for long "o" or "u" and y for long "i"). It is the use of plenic writing which has led to the misidentification of these systems of writing as "consonantal alphabets," when in reality they are syllabaries.

Paleographers saw these "weak" syllabic signs as mere vowels, and consequently interpreted plenic writing to be a development toward a partial or incomplete vowel system for the so-called "consonantal alphabets" rather than for what it really was. It was because of this misconception that the Phoenicians were accredited with "inventing" the first alphabet. But plenic writing has been found in a number of other systems which are assuredly and definitely syllabic. It has been through comparisons of all these systems of writing that the error was finally recognized. Prof. Gelb sees the distinction as extremely important in studying the evolution of the structure of writing systems.

However, plenic writing did make clear the dire need to express all the vowel sounds in every word to further improve accuracy in the transmission of knowledge, which led to the development of a true alphabet.

This brings us to the alphabetic stage of writing. We have just seen that the so-called "alphabet" used by the Phoenicians was in reality a syllabary incorporating the technique of plenic writing. The so-called "vowels" of plenic writing are in reality no vowels at all, but rather certain syllabic signs used as memnic devices to alert the reader to the presence of a long vowel-sound.

It is to the Greeks that the credit must go for the invention of a true alphabet; since the addition of a few more signs representing true vowel-sounds (which enabled them to follow each initial consonantal sound with the appropriate vowel-sound), accomplished the final result of "a single character for every single sound," which is the definition of a true alphabet.

Evolution of letters from early Phoenician to the Roman

So where does this leave the Phoenicians and the Atlanteans? The most that we can accredit the Phoenicians with is the forms of the characters used in their system. And, as we have seen, these may have come from Atlantis! At least, they may have been "western" rather than "eastern" in origin. The letters on this page (since they evolved from the "Phoenician alphabet") may have had their origin in Atlantis! That question is explored in the articles on the controversial Glozel Tablets, and classical testimony which add weight to this hypothesis. +++

SUPPORTING EVIDENCE By R. Cedric Leonard

According to ancient Greek legends Cadmus was a Phoenician prince who founded Thebes in Boeotia, and among several other things invented the alphabet. In spite of the popularity of this tradition (supported by Herodotus, 450 B.C.), this was doubted even in ancient times. For instance, Tacitus says:

The Egyptians also claim to have invented the alphabet, which the Phoenicians. . . appropriated the glory, giving out that they had discovered what they had really been taught. (Annals 11.14)

We know now that as early as 3,000 B.C. the beginnings of a writing system existed on Crete, and by 2,000 B.C. the Minoans were in possession of a syllabic "alphabet"1 which we have named Linear A (Jackson, 1981). And this was hundreds of years before Cadmus' time. We have learned also that, far from being illiterate as once thought, the Achaean Greeks modified Linear A slightly in order to use it for their own language (Linear B). In other words, the Achaean Greeks were using an alphabet hundreds of years before the "Phoenician" version of the alphabet was introduced into Greece at the time of the Dorian invasion.

It is a given that the Roman letters we use today evolved from the actual characters used by the Phoenicians of the Near East. But did the Phoenicians invent the letters, or did they merely learn of them from earlier sources. Diodorus (1st Cent. B.C.) expresses caution in the acceptance of this Phoenician "invention":

Men tell us. . . that the Phoenicians were not the first to make the discovery of letters; but that they did no more than change the form of the letters; whereupon the majority of mankind made use of the way of writing them as the Phoenicians devised. (Lib. Hist., Book V).

There are ancient and venerable traditions which point to a western, rather than an eastern, origin of our alphabet. In the same work Diodorus mentions that the Phoenicians had discovered a marvelous Atlantic island during their excursions outside Gibraltar. Atlantis was long gone, of course, but the survivors of that catastrophe still existed on the Canary Islands (and possibly others) and it is known that the Guanches inhabiting those islands possessed a system of characters with which the Phoenicians could have been familiar.

Manetho (250 B.C.) also recorded that the Egyptians themselves derived the elements of their writing from an island in the west. Ancient Egyptian papyri also attribute the invention of writing to the god Thoth who ruled a "Western Domain" (Book of the Dead, Chap. LXXXV). These same papyri declare that Thoth came from an Island of Flame (Atlantis was very volcanic, and perished in flames). The Turin Papyrus (1300 B.C.) lists Thoth as one of the ten kings who reigned during the "reign of the gods," more than 12,000 years ago.

Strabo, the Greek historian, records a tradition that Tartessos (on the Atlantic coast of Spain) had written records that go back 7,000 years before their time (500 B.C.), which is equivalent to saying that writing was being utilized on the Atlantic coast of Spain 9,500 years ago. These are strong traditions suggesting the existence of an older, unnamed culture in the west that had long been familiar with the art of writing.

One of the most important finds are the several hundreds of stones dating from the final stages of the Ice Age in a cave at Mas d'Azil in France. The 12,000-year-old Azilian rocks are painted with designs "which show astonishing similarity with later Greek and Latin letters" (Behn, 1948). Some experts have speculated that the cave might have been a writing school for Ice Age children.

Also, there are the bone calendars (date 20,000 B.C.), which until properly analyzed, could possibly represent a form of writing according to experts in anthropology and paleography (Marshack, 1972). Can a relationship be demonstrated between some of the better known western "alphabetic" (syllabic) writing systems and our Glozel prototype? The answer is, "Yes!"

First, there are the inscriptions on the Canary Islands (especially those on Hierro and Grand Canary): the script resembles Numidian and appears to be composed of some twenty four characters and a number of ideograms (Cline, 1953). There is also a "kinship" recognized between some of these Canary Island scripts and the Iberian and Sinai "alphabets" (Wolfel, 1942).

The Numidian (Berber) writing is "alphabetic" (technically a syllabary; Gelb, 1974). The Tuaregs of North Africa speak Tamachek, but their written language, T'ifinagh, is also "alphabetic" (syllabic) and is closely related to the Basque language. T'ifinagh is being forgotten before it can be either properly classified or translated (Friedrich, 1957). The close similarity between all these "western" systems, and their difference from the "eastern" cuneiform (Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Hittite, Ugaritic) systems cannot be ignored.

Even the Aymara Indians living along the shores of Lake Titicaca in South America were in possession of an ideographic form of writing when the Spanish conquistadors appeared on the scene (in spite of a ban on writing put in effect by the 63rd Inca ruler, Topu Gaui Pachacuti). Some of these signs correspond exactly to the characters found on the Canary Island tablets and among the Tuaregs and Berbers in North Africa (Wilkins, 1946).

Does all this sound familiar somehow? Basques, Berbers, Tuaregs, Guanches, and even the Aymaras of South America? We are talking about the same areas, the same people, the same language, and the same culture called "Atlantic" by learned scholars. In other words, our Cro-Magnon-Atlanteans.

There must have been a "western" prototype (which I believe we have in the Glozel Tablets), completely independent of the eastern writing system which evolved later in Sumar, for all these "Atlantic" systems to be so much alike. Prof. W. Z. Ripley (1899) agrees: "A system of writing seems also to have been invented in western Europe as far back as the Stone Age." We will demonstrate the validity of this startling statement in the article entitled Ancient Alphabets Compared.

1It is demonstrated on this website that all the so-called "alphabets" before the Greek invention of the vowel signs are technically syllabaries, but the topic under discussion here is the characters which form the components of these early writing systems. [Back]