The origin of the alphabet has long been a subject for research,
speculation and myths. What is striking is how successful both the (widely
copied) principle of the alphabet has been as well as the particular
Graeco/Roman forms. How to explain the survival of the principle and of the
forms of the alphabet over thousands of years? How to explain also the
contemporary effectiveness of the forms of the alphabet in transducing visual
patterning at very high speeds into the brain patternings constituting
language? There are several possible directions. One approach is in terms of
the psychological, physiological and perceptual problems faced by the
originator of the alphabet. Another approach, of course, is in terms of the
archaeological record. A third approach might focus on the perceptual process
by which the alphabet functions.
In his entertaining account Fifty Years in Phonetics (1991). David
Abercrombie includes a chapter about phonetic iconicity in writing systems.
He quotes Bishop John Wilkins (one of the early members of the Royal Society)
as saying (in 1668) that there should be "some kind of sutableness, or
correspondency of the figures to the nature and kind of the Letters which they
express". Abercrombie continues: "[phonetic iconicity of the articulatory
kind] has fascinated people for many centuries... There are two theories
involving the idea. The first theory, the weaker one, holds that writing
systems ought to be iconic; while the second, a stronger one, holds that
writing systems are iconic ... this second theory claims that most writing
systems originate with articulatory iconic signs....Various people have put
forward the stronger theory in the past. Van Helmont made the claim for Hebrew
writing in the seventeenth century. Sir William Jones said, in 1786, 'all the
symbols of sound... at first, probably, were only rude outlines of different
organs of speech'". (Abercrombie 1991: 93)
The account of the origin of the alphabet in this paper would have to be
classified as a strong theory of phonetic iconicity. One may reasonably ask:
why is any new theory of the origin of the alphabet needed? If palaeography
and archaeology can provide a solid, plausible account of the development of
the alphabet from earlier writing systems, then no new theory is needed. The
first step then is to summarise more traditional theories about the origin of
the alphabet and to assess how plausible, well-supported and generally agreed
they are. If they are unconvincing or contentious, then it may be profitable
to examine in a quite different way what the problems were that faced the
inventor of the alphabet, the way in which he might have proceeded and how
consistent with an articulatory theory the results have been.
Questions one needs to consider in theorising about the historical fact
of the invention of the alphabet are, for example: how is an alphabet to be
identified or defined as such? why do the letters have these shapes and not
other shapes? why was the alphabet invented only once (if that is the case),
why has the alphabet we now have been so long-lasting and so widely used? how
would you set about creating an alphabet? why were early versions of the
alphabet wholly consonantal (if they were)? what special problems were there
in devising characters to represent vowels? In addition there are other more
specifically historical questions such as: why did syllabaries not evolve
directly into alphabets (in China or Japan as well as in Egypt and
Mesopotamia)? why did the cuneiform and hieroglyphic systems fall into disuse?
how does one explain deviant alphabets such as runes and the glagolitic
alphabet (which may differ in the number of characters, in the form of the
characters, in the alphabetic order or in the names of the characters) ? It
is impossible to attempt to cover these matters in one short paper but one
should not overlook the existence of problems and queries such as these.
The origin of the alphabet is of course a quite separate issue from that
of the origin of writing. Denise Schmandt-Besserat (and Roy Harris) have in
their recent publications both emphasised this. Writing had a history for
thousands of years before the invention of the alphabet.
Schmandt-Besserat(1992) has suggested that writing was the culmination of an
evolutionary process in which visual symbols had been used and manipulated in
increasingly complex ways to convey increasingly abstract and complex
information. She identified the Sumerian use of tokens as the turning point
in the use of symbols for communication because it bridged the gap between the
primitive visual symbolic systems and the development of writing; the token
system was built on the foundation laid by the Paleolithic tallies.
Harris(1986) similarly pointed out that the development of the alphabet is a
comparatively late event.
The two great writing systems before the alphabet appeared were the
Sumerian and the Egyptian. These were in a number of respects similar in their
origin and development, their major differences flowing from the different
writing materials they used.Both initially contained a very substantial
pictographic element; both evolved towards syllabaries. The oldest of the
developed scripts was the cuneiform; the second oldest was the Egyptian
hieroglyphic.
Both in the case of cuneiform and of hieroglyphs, only a limited circle
understood the script, the scribes, officials, doctors, priests. The number
and complexity of the symbols made any more general literacy improbable. In
the classical period, the number of hieroglyphs totalled approximately 700 and
the number of symbols increased to several thousand in about 500 BC. Similarly
there were hundreds of cuneiform symbols, with ever-growing complexity as
symbols might be interpreted in different languages, as words, as syllables
or occasionally as single speech-sounds, producing what Doblhofer describes
as "the terrifying polyphony of cuneiform...this obscure, impracticable,
ambiguous writing" (1973: 144). In both the hieroglyphic and the cuneiform
systems, an extensive system of determinatives developed to reduce ambiguity
along with phonetic indications for the same purpose. One gets the impression
of a very similar line of development to those of the Chinese and Japanese
systems of writing.
The Egyptians never reduced their writing to an alphabet and the same was
until comparatively recently believed to be true for cuneiform. Both systems
made some apparent progress towards an alphabet. The Egyptian scribes
developed an acrophonic pseudo-alphabet and there was the cuneiform alphabet
discovered at Ugarit. considered below. The Egyptian pseudo-alphabet consisted
of twenty-four consonants; it was in use for nearly-alphabetic transcription
of foreign names in the Middle Kingdom, that is during the early 2nd
millennium BC. (Naveh 1987: 1).
Much more importantly in the case of cuneiform was the discovery of
Ugarit, from the excavations begun by the French in 1929 at Ras Shamra on the
North Syrian coast. Ugarit was a capital city which was at the height of its
prosperity from about 1450 to 1200 BC and was destroyed in the 12th century.
When the large temple was excavated, the high priest's library produced a very
considerable number of texts written on clay tablets. These were both in
Babylonian cuneiform and in a hitherto unknown cuneiform script. Similarly to
the north-west Semitic writing (found in much the same general area), the new
script turned out to be purely alphabetic with no syllable signs, ideograms
or determinatives. Several copies of a 30-character alphabet were found
representing twenty seven consonants and three vowels. The texts found at Ras
Shamra were remarkably diverse in script and language: four languages,
Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian and Hurrian, and seven different scripts,
Egyptian and Hittite hieroglyphic, Cypro-Minoan, Sumerian, Akkadian, Hurrian
and Ugaritic cuneiform.
The origin of the Ugaritic script remains a mystery. Driver interpreted
it as an experimental attempt to adapt the cuneiform to the alphabetic system
in the light of the Phoenician alphabet. Doblhofer notes that Jensen
(described as the broadest alphabet scholar of the century) in 1935 considered
that the problem of the origin of Ugaritic cuneiform had not been solved. No
great advance has taken place since then. Investigators have variously
considered Ugaritic forms as an imitation or development of the northern
Semitic alphabet, as a derivation from so-called Sinaitic writing, or even as
a simplification and reduction of the Babylonian syllabic signs. "All these
attempts can be considered as failures. Another more plausible theory is...
that the Ras Shamra cuneiform script is not an inherited and adapted system
but a free creation, the autonomous invention of a man who, while knowing the
north Semitic alphabet... was used to writing with the aid of a sharpened reed
on wet clay tablets"(Doblhofer 1973: 216-217). Even this account is open to
doubt - the relative dating of the Ugaritic and the Semitic alphabets presents
a problem. The oldest inscriptions in the Phoenician alphabetic writing date
from ca. 1000 B.C., the earliest Ugaritic script is thought to date from about
1500 BC.
Neither the Egyptian pseudo-alphabet nor the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet
became widely used or appears to have survived for long. The successful
alphabet was, of course, the Phoenician, ultimately adopted (with additions
and variations) by the Greeks and Romans and which we use today. The debate
over the centuries has been about the manner in which this alphabet originated
and spread and, in particular, its relation to earlier writing systems. The
traditionally accepted view has been that whilst syllabaries were developed
independently in various parts of the world, alphabetic writing was invented
only once, "a conscious and free creation by one man" (Jensen, following
Bauer, 1970: 270). Diringer also concludes that the alphabet has been invented
only once, though whether this is correct depends on how one categorises the
Ugaritic script.
The Greeks and Romans considered five different peoples as the possible
inventors of the alphabet they used - the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians,
Cretans and Hebrews. Modern views regarding the ultimate origin of the
alphabet are almost as numerous. There still remain a the Egyptian theory, the
Cretan theory, the Sumerian, the 'geometric' theory. The most favoured account
sees the North Semitic alphabet as the earliest known form of alphabet and
dates its appearance to the first half of the second millennium B.C. However,
this leaves the further question whether the alphabet was an unheralded
invention or in some way developed from a previous writing system,
specifically from the Egyptian or the Sumerian. Martinet has recently
commented: "on peut hésiter entre le sumérien et l'égyptien"
(Martinet 1993: 22).
The theory which has for many years commanded the greatest degree of
support has been that the alphabet is one more step (though obviously a most
important one) in a continuous process of refinement and conventionalisation
of writing. The endeavour has been to discover evidence of the gradual steps
by which scripts which initially were pictographic became formalised
progressively and ultimately converted into the non-representational letters
of the Roman alphabet. In the absence largely of any more likely source, the
most strenuous efforts have been made to establish a connection between
Egyptian hieroglyphs and the earliest Semitic forms.
Geoffrey Driver, who was Professor of Semitic Philology at Oxford, argued
for an essentially Egyptian origin for the North Semitic alphabet.
Nevertheless he concluded on the origin of the alphabet: "Who first took this
step is and may always remain unknown; all that can be said is that he or they
were sprung in all probability from one or other of the Semitic peoples who
came into contact with the Egyptians c. 2500- 1500 B.C.... the invention was
developed in Palestine and perfected on the Phoenician coast. It survived to
be carried by the Phoenicians overseas to Greece, whence it passed to the
nations of the western hemisphere".(Driver, 1954: 196). The other main
hypothesis, evolved after the discoveries at Ugarit, argued for development
of the Semitic/Phoenician alphabet from the cuneiform system.
Here one has to make a distinction between two issues: the origination of
the principle of the alphabet, that is, the production of a symbolic system
which represents by single characters a limited number of distinct speech
sounds (rather than words, ideas, or syllables) and, on the other hand, the
origin of the particular forms and sound-values which ultimately went to form
the alphabet as we know it. The Egyptian pseudo-alphabet, in effect and
probably without any deliberate intention, constituted such a restricted set
of characters (though without vowels). The Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet
included some vowels as well as a full set of consonants and could more
justifiably be thought to express the genuine alphabetic principle. Ugaritic
characters, however, with the sound-values attached to them, apparently never
gained wide acceptance any more than did the Egyptian pseudo-alphabet. If one
compares the characters in these two scripts with the North Semitic set of
characters, It seems pretty obvious that neither the Egyptian pseudo-alphabet
nor the Ugaritic alphabet can plausibly be seen as precursors of the forms
which the characters of the alphabet took - though there is more of a query
about the relation between the order of the Ugaritic characters and the order
of the North Semitic alphabet. The earliest evidenced abecedary - that is,
letters written in the fixed alphabetic order - undoubtedly comes from Ugarit
and dates back to the 16th century B.C.(Naveh, 1982: 1)
Diringer suggests that the north-western Semitic inventor or inventors
(Canaanites, Hebrews, or Phoenicians) of the alphabet were influenced by
Egyptian writing ; he thinks that they were probably also acquainted with most
of the scripts current in the eastern Mediterranean. He suggests that the
original letters were probably conventional signs and not pictures used as
ideograms. "The great achievement in the creation of the alphabet was not the
invention of signs but the inner working principle... each sound represented
by one symbol and each symbol generally represents one sound"(Diringer 1976:
619). This is arguable - the Egyptians and the Ugaritians had more or less
achieved 'the alphabetic principle'. What made the alphabet ultimately
successful was the selection of the forms of the characters and the limitation
of the number of distinct sounds which the characters represented (omitting
all the refinements of vowel and consonantal sounds which modern phonetics has
identified). Driver, after comparing the Semitic, Egyptian and cuneiform
characters, concluded that "the borrowing of the Phoenician alphabet can
hardly have been immediate....the Egyptian signs ... show few, if any, close
resemblances to the Phoenician letters... and [when there is resemblance of
signs] the value of the signs does not generally agree."(Driver 1954; 139}
This one can see for oneself.
Detailed speculation about the relationships of the alphabet has
concentrated a great deal also on the names of the letters, on the relation
between the names and the forms of the letters and on the variation in the
forms of the letters in different places and cultures. Driver argued that the
names must have come first; "if the signs had preceded the names, there would
be no reason why the letters should take any particular forms; their forms
therefore were based on their names... The names must be regarded as going
back to the very beginnings of the alphabet." (Driver, 1954: 152, 160). In
this he assumed that the forms must have been derived, not original
inventions, but the relation between form and name in fact is highly
speculative - "the Aramaic and Arabic name for n is nun 'fish'... but... the
sign at no stage... resembles a fish. If then a fish is meant, it must have
been an eel... [the sign for qop koppa ] has been thought to be from the word
for bird-trap but is generally supposed to be the Hebrew for monkey" (Driver
1954: 168). Diringer, on the other hand, contends that the principle governing
the conventional names of the letters was acrophony; names were not derived
from pictographic representations of the letters but were an artificial
mnemonic device. Jensen concludes that the meanings brought forward up to now
for the Semitic names of the alphabet "belong in the realm of pure concept-
guessing".(Jensen 1970: 269)
There has been equally various speculation about the factors determining
the order of the alphabet and argument about whether or not the order has any
special significance. Driver has a useful discussion of this. "The order of
the Phoenician alphabet is attested by the evidence of the Hebrew scriptures
[acrostic Psalms] and confirmed by external authority.. [the step at
Lachish]... The most fantastic reasons for the order of the letters have been
suggested based, for example, on astral or lunar theories, even to the extent
of using South-Semitic meanings of cognate words to explain the North-Semitic
names. Another method has been to seek for mnemonic words which the successive
letters when combined into words may spell out [ab gad father grandfather
-from different language dialects] (Driver, 1954: 181) The order of the
alphabet has recently been explained as representing a didactic poem.... The
latest suggestion is that the order of the letters of the Semitic alphabet is
based on the notation of the Sumerian musical scales". (Driver, 1954: 268)
Diringer briefly remarks: "As to the order of the letters, various theories
have been propounded, but here again [as for the names of the letters] it is
highly probable that the matter has no particular significance...There is some
appearance of phonetic grouping in the order of the letters of the North
Semitic alphabet, but this may be accidental(Diringer 1968: 169-170).
Finally, in this very compressed survey of debate about the alphabet, there
has been some puzzlement about the source of variations in the forms of the
alphabetic characters in different places and cultures. - so to say, errors
in transmission. Herodotus says that the Phoenicians who came with Cadmus
introduced into Greece upon their arrival a great variety of arts, among the
rest that of writing "And originally they shaped their letters exactly like
all the other Phoenicians, but afterwards, in course of time, they changed by
degrees their language, and together with it the form likewise of their
characters".(1858: 25) Individual signs in early Greek inscriptions frequently
vary so much in form that it is clearly impossible to speak of a single Greek
alphabet in this early period; the borrowing and adaptation of the Phoenician
writing took place independently in the various areas of the Greek world (Gelb
180). Naveh says the fact that the archaic Greek alphabet had not one set of
letters but various local forms also poses a problem; "we know that the
Phoenician script was a uniform one, without regional variations" (Naveh 182)
And there are some more notorious and unexplained variations in supposedly
descendant alphabets, particularly the runic and glagolitic alphabets. The
order of the runes differs completely from the Semitic, Greek, Etruscan and
Latin alphabets. Jensen comments "where do the strange names of the runes come
from? And their special order? And the supplementary signs of the runic
alphabet?" Speculation about the origin of the runic alphabet includes
"another hypothesis, the native originality of the runes as primordial
Germanic script" (Jensen 1970: 573-574) Diringer comments that the origin of
the runes offers many difficult problems and speculates that it might be from
a North Etruscan Alpine alphabet.(Diringer 1976: 625) The glagolitic alphabet
is another puzzle: an alphabet with 40 letters, in form very unlike the Greek
or Cyrillic letters.
What comments can one make on the debate about the history of the
alphabet? First of all, despite the great effort of research, despite the
scholarly firepower brought to bear, there is clearly no consensus, and indeed
not a very high degree of confidence on the part of those espousing one or
other theories about the history of the alphabet's development. Secondly,
objectively there is not a great deal of plausibility in the accounts given
of the origin of the shapes, order, values or names of the letters of the
alphabet - a point on which I shortly invite the reader to form his own view.
Each of the scholars puts forward his own ideas but which ipse dixit should
we accept? Is the choice as Thom suggests only between an Egyptian or a
Sumerian origin? The important point to note is that all of those who have
taken part in the prolonged debate about the origin of the alphabet have
pursued essentially the same academic/literary approach, that the 'invention'
of the alphabet was not really an invention in the sense of something
completely new but a modification of what already existed, in much the same
way as one might trace a line of literary or artistic style throughout the
centuries; what this academic approach involved was looking for a succession
of documents, inscriptions, which would demonstrate a gradual transition from
some earlier form of writing to the fully developed alphabet.
What then should be our next step in the light of this failure to provide
a convincing and at least generally agreed account of the origin of the
alphabet? As a preliminary, perhaps we might look directly at the evidence to
see how plausible we judge the academic account of a gradual transition from
hieroglyphs or cuneiform to the alphabet. The three tables inserted here
(drawn from Geoffrey Driver's excellent study) show respectively the cuneiform
material, the hieroglyphic material and the early Greek forms of the alphabet.
I do not propose to attempt any extensive commentary on these tables - only
to comment that to me the attempts to relate hieroglyphic and alphabetic
forms, or cuneiform and alphabetic forms are far from compelling. The reader
can study them for himself to see whether he agrees.
Figure 2 shows a selection of Egyptian hieroglyphs chosen because their
meanings are the same as or believed to be relatable to the meanings of the
names of the characters of the Semitic or Phoenician alphabets or the shapes
of the hieroglyphs resemble the shapes of Semitic characters. For example, the
Egyptian hieroglyph for `mouth` is matched with the Semitic character named
`pe' which means `mouth`. The forms of the characters resemble one another,
though not very closely, but the sounds attached to them are completely
different - the sound of `pe' is P but the sound of the Egyptian hieroglyph
is RI. Similarly the Semitic `aleph` which is taken to mean `ox` is matched
with an Egyptian hieroglyph for an ox but the sound is `kt`, quite different
from that of aleph. It is hardly surprising that where the names of Semitic
characters are thought to have a specific meaning (based on their shape),
Egyptian hieroglyphs chosen as having the same meaning should have somewhat
similar shapes. In many cases the comparisons are very far-fetched and
certainly not at all persuasive in demonstrating an Egyptian origin for the
links between sounds and shapes in Semitic alphabets.
Figure 3 is a parallel attempt to bring together evidence of a relation
between cuneiform signs and Semitic characters. One needs the eye of faith to
find these conjunctions any more convincing for a cuneiform origin of Semitic
characters, despite Driver's comment reproduced in the figure.
Figure 4 shows early Greek alphabets arranged in the order of the Hebrew
alphabet. Though, according to Herodotus, the characters originally in use in
various parts of Greece differed, there is on the whole little variation
except perhaps for some of the vowels and for the letters R and B. There is
no indication that the shapes of the characters have any relation to the forms
of the hieroglyphs or of the cuneiform signs shown in Figures 2 and 3.
Accordingly, if one judges that the evidential material is far from
strengthening one's belief in the academic approach I have described, that is,
gradual modification of earlier forms of writing to produce the forms of the
alphabet, then one is justified in considering whether any different approach
to the origin of the alphabet is conceivable. Putting the academic approach,
temporarily at least, on one side, in the remainder of the paper I explore
whether a quite different view of the origin, the 'true invention' of the
alphabet is conceivable, plausible and executable.
What other approaches might be considered? One which has been suggested
quite often in the past most notably by Sir William Jones the great Sanskrit
scholar, is that the letters of the alphabet originally might have represented
a picturing of the positions or movements of the mouth and other articulatory
organs in producing the distinct sounds represented by the alphabet. As I have
already mentioned, this is something which Bishop Wilkins in his Real
Character described as an ideal in developing a system of characters. An
interesting attempt was made by Charles Davy in the 18th century (about which
I will say more later) but apart from this whilst the desirability of an
iconic alphabet has of been suggested, very little of practical value has been
achieved. In modern times there have been several attempts to create an iconic
alphabet (as well as separate attempts to create phonetically precise
non-iconic alphabets e.g. the alphabet of the International Phonetic
Association IPA). The most ambitious attempt in the 19th century was made by
Alexander Bell (father of Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor with Edison, of
the telephone). Alexander Bell's main concern was to facilitate the education
of the deaf.
Figure 5 shows the characters devised by Bell for what he called Visible
Speech
The alphabet had many more characters than the traditional Roman alphabet
and aimed at a precise representation of the articulatory positions and
movements required to produce speech sounds correctly. Henry Sweet, perhaps
the pre-eminent phonetician of the 19th century, subsequently revised Bell's
system and created his own system which he called the Organic Alphabet. Though
Visible Speech had an astonishing success, Abercrombie comments: "I doubt if
we shall ever have a better iconic notation than Bell's, and alas as a
notation it is not very good, even as improved by Sweet.... it seems
inescapable that many of the signs in an iconic alphabet look much too much
alike" (Abercrombie, 1990: 100)
Sweet's discussion of Visible Speech and of the problems in creating an
articulatory iconic alphabet is illuminating and can be applied
retrospectively to understand the problems faced by the original inventor of
the alphabet, as the following extracts show. They are from the collection of
Sweet's books and articles over the years edited by Eugenie Henderson(1971)
under the title The Indispensable Foundation [Note particularly how Sweet in
the later extracts moves from the original idea of indicating every separate
sound by a separate character to an approach much more resembling the broad
brush approach of the traditional alphabet]:
"Choice of Letters. The object of an alphabet being to represent to the eye
the sounds of a language by means of written symbols, it follows that in a
rational alphabet -
(1) Every simple sound must have a distinct symbol, and (2) There must be
a definite relation between each sound and its symbol.
These principles are carried out in Mr. Bell's 'Visible Speech'. In this
alphabet each letter symbolizes the action of the vocal organ by which it is
formed, according to certain fixed principles.... The Roman alphabet...
evidently falls far short of this standard.... [It] supplies an utterly
inadequate number of symbols for the sounds of most languages. (p. 205)
"[to avoid the multiplication of difficult to remember symbols] it is
necessary to have an alphabet which indicates only those broader distinctions
of sound which actually correspond to distinctions of meaning in language, and
indicate them by letters which can be easily written and remembered. (p. 230
)
The value for scientific purposes of an alphabet in which every letter
would be practically a diagram of the actions by which the sound is produced
would be incalculable... (p. 239)
"[against the objection that changes in knowledge of the physiology of
articulation may make such an alphabet out of date] If we impartially survey
the whole field of phonetic knowledge, we shall see that the great majority
of the facts are really as firmly established as anything can well be. It is,
for instance, absolutely certain that p, b, and m are all formed by the lips,
and that k, g, and ng are all formed by the back of the tongue, also that p,
b, k, g, are formed by complete stoppage, that m, and ng are nasal, and so
on.... The vowels have always offered greater difficulty, but many of the main
divisions of palatal, labial, high and low, etc., have been agreed on long
ago. (p. 241)
"When we say 'alphabetic', we mean only alphabetic basis. The maxim 'one
single symbol for each sound' is all very well in theory, but impossible to
carry out in practice. (p. 244)
"Bell's Visible Speech.... The complete alphabet of 119 single letters (p.
257)
"... a few remarks on the principles of sound-symbolization from a purely
graphic point of view. It is evident that the two main requisites are
distinctiveness and simplicity, which are to a certain extent opposed to one
another, this opposition becoming more and more marked as the number of
letters increases. (p. 270)
"The Roman alphabet has reached its present high standard of simplicity and
clearness by a gradual process of wearing down and elimination extending over
thousands of years, and it is interesting to note that Visible Speech,
although an independent and a-priorily constructed system has many letters
which are, as regards the elements of which they are composed, identical with
Roman ones. (p. 271)
[Henry Sweet was the prototype of Shaw's Henry Higgins in Pygmalion (My
Fair Lady). He was not, in fact, a figure of fun. He and Otto Jespersen were
the leading figures in the movement which ultimately led to the creation of
the International Phonetic Alphabet]
Though in practical terms both Bell's Visible Speech and Sweet's Organic
Alphabet must be accounted as failures (despite the widespread acclaim Visible
Speech received, it was never used much for ordinary purposes), the attempt
to construct an alphabet which would represent the articulatory movements in
producing speech sounds was in many ways instructive. It offers useful
guidance in considering the problems to be resolved by the inventor of an
articulatory alphabet or by someone trying to replicate the invention. From
Sweet's comments I would particularly pick out as relevant:
1) the need for a definite relation between each sound and the character
representing it
2) the need to limit the set of characters to speech sounds which
correspond to distinctions of meaning (an anticipation by Sweet of the
phonemic principle)
3) the aim of making each character a 'diagram' of the sound
4) the impossibility of providing a different symbol for each minor
difference of speech sound
5) the characters should be easy to distinguish and remember
These were excellent principles but it is doubtful whether Bell's alphabet
or the version devised by Sweet lived up to them. The number of characters in
Visible Speech far exceeds the number of phonemes found in English or other
languages. The characters are far too similar to each other. The forms of the
characters do not have the clear diagrammatic relation to the mode of
articulation of the sounds which Sweet thought necessary. The forms of the
characters were very heavily and unfortunately influenced by the limitations
of the typefaces Bell and Sweet had available. Sweet and Bell also perhaps
underestimated the difficulties involved in distinguishing and representing
certain speech sounds, particularly the vowels.
It is a natural transition from consideration of the defects of Bell and
Sweet's alphabets to reflect on the problems faced by the inventor of the
Semitic/Phoenician alphabet. We have to attempt to put ourselves mentally in
the situation of the original inventor, the circumstances which made the
construction of an alphabet desirable and the decisions to be made in
representing the articulation of speech sounds by visual patterns.
One can only speculate about the circumstances. What seems certain is that
there must have been some strong incentive - some keen perception of the
potential usefulness of an alphabet representing articulatory movements. In
the case of Alexander Bell, there was the strong motivation of trying to
construct an alphabet which would help the deaf to speak more normally by
representing the ways in which they should shape their mouths. In the case of
the Semitic alphabet, the inventor could have been someone involved in the
sea-trade of the Syrian coast, dealing with traders speaking many languages,
needing to keep records, to transmit orders to distant ports and so on. Or he
could have been someone working with records in many languages and scripts as
at Ugarit in the library of the high priest. If the inventor was a merchant,
or working for a merchant, then there would be no guarantee that those he
traded with would be able to understand cuneiform or hieroglyphic scripts. If
the inventor was associated with the library at Ugarit, he would be very much
aware of the multiplicity of scripts and languages and the usefulness of some
medium which could be used regardless of differences of language or origin.
I am inclined to prefer the idea of a clerk (an academic!) at Ugarit familiar
with the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet but who recognised that alphabet was only
useful for people already familiar with cuneiform and to whom the necessary
writing equipment was available, the clay tablets and implements needed to
produce cuneiform characters. It seems much more probable that the medium used
by the inventor to develop the new alphabet was not clay but sand, the most
readily available and easily worked medium in the Levant. Sand was used for
the earliest geometric diagrams and would be much more appropriate than clay
for drawing rounded as well as angular characters.
The circumstances of the invention, trade or religious or record-keeping,
or some combination of all three, fit well with other pointers to Syria as the
origin of the alphabet, somewhere intermediate between Egypt and Mesopotamia,
and not wholly committed either to the hieroglyphic or to the cuneiform
tradition. The idea which might have sparked off the construction of the
alphabet would simply be: Why should I not represent speech by a picture of
someone's face as he produces a particular sound? A next stage might have
been: Why should I not limit the picture to the parts of the face which are
used in speaking? And then if observing others speak resulted in diagrams
which were not sufficiently distinct for the different sounds: Why not pay
attention to my own way of speaking, and try to represent that?
The inventor of the alphabet would have to decide, perhaps over a lengthy
period of trial and error, which were the separate speech sounds to represent,
how best to imitate each sound visually. He would have found that there are
many different speech sounds, that different people speak differently
(dialectal and register differences) and that different languages use
different sets of sounds. He would have needed to settle on an order in which
the sounds and shapes should be placed. There would have been a particular
problem with continuous sounds - or varying sounds - or very similar sounds
(vowels). Some way of remembering the order of the characters and the sounds
associated with them would have been necessary. The shapes the characters took
might have reminded him of some ordinary object, a hand, an ox's head, an eye.
Perhaps the key step for the inventor would have been (as in the case of Bell
and Sweet) observing himself as he prepared to utter one of the speech sounds,
the birth of introspection.
Modern alphabet-builders start off with a much fuller knowledge of the
variation of speech sounds and the complexities of articulation. It was
perhaps too much knowledge which led to the weaknesses in the alphabets
produced by Bell and Sweet, particularly their treatment of the vowels. The
consonantal speech sounds are a relatively limited and straightforward
collection of articulations. A main problem over the years for phoneticians
has been the articulation of vowels. Ladefoged in Three Areas of Experimental
Phonetics (1967) gives an illuminating account of the difficulties. Accepting
that speaking is a series of controlled gestures of the vocal organs (and
incidentally recognising that alphabetic writing represents an immense
technical advance), Ladefoged observes that Sweet, in modifying and
elaborating Bell's system, was able to specify 72 vowel qualities. He
comments:
Bell's tabulation of tongue positions is obviously closely allied to many
modern methods of classifying vowels. But we should note that this is not a
measure of its validity.... we are apt to believe that this system of
description is based on known facts. But our modern descriptions of vowels are
not the result of experimental observation of articulations, but are largely
a direct adaptation of Bell's two-dimensional tabulation. .. [Bell] based his
theory mainly on subjective impressions.... his knowledge of articulatory
positions was in fact not much greater" [than earlier traditional accounts].
(Ladefoged, 1967: 66 ff.)
The modern situation according to Ladefoged is not a great deal more
firmly based: "It is probably incorrect to consider that points on vowel
diagrams [as originated by Daniel Jones] describe tongue positions for any
speaker, even approximately"(Ladefoged, 1967: 70). The experiment which
Ladefoged reported used a number of professional phoneticians as subjects.
They found it difficult to produce descriptions of vowel sounds in ways which
communicated the quality of the vowels to other professional phoneticians.
I have included this excursus on the problems of describing or
representing vowels simply to explain why we should not be surprised that the
early Semitic alphabets (or the Hebrew square alphabet and the Arabic
alphabets devised many centuries later) contained no characters representing
vowels. The problem of choosing which vowels to include, if any, and deciding
how best they might be diagrammed, would have been even more difficult in the
multilingual environment in which the alphabet probably originated.
In commenting above, I suggested that a good way to explore the problems
of the inventor of the alphabet would be to attempt to replicate the process,
to create an alphabet based on representation of articulatory positions and
movements in producing the different speech sounds. This I have done and
present the results in the next section of this paper. The stages in the
process were much the same as those I suggested above were followed by the
original inventor of the Semitic alphabet, a progress from a representation
of faces, to a diagramming of the articulatory organs, relying at first on how
others speak and then on observation of one's own articulation.
However before discussing the illustrations of the stages, it may be
convenient to give a description of the general approach, what might be called
the theory of the articulatory basis of the alphabet. The basic idea is that,
not necessarily in a fully systematic way, there is isomorphism or
homoeomorphism between the shapes of the letters of the alphabet and the
sounds of the letters they relate to i.e. that the shapes of the letters of
the alphabet reflect a phonetic or phonological principle. The alphabet
originally was not the result of a slow process of modification of an earlier
pictographic or cuneiform script but was a genuinely new invention (perhaps
made by more than one individual at different times) picturing the processes
of articulation of speech sounds. The alphabet was a collection of
diagrammatic signs which indicate in an economical and ingenious way the means
by which a man can make any particular sound; the signs include those for the
teeth, the lips, the tongue, the nose and the roof and back of the mouth and
perhaps also the tension in producing stop consonants and the current of air
in producing vowels. By observation of other speakers and by the unpopular but
vital method of introspection used by all phoneticians, it is possible to form
a view on the positions of the speech organs required to produce any
particular sound. If a system can be devised by which these positions of the
organs are shown, one man will be able to indicate to another, by means of a
drawing, the kind of sound he wishes to convey.
It is not to be supposed that the early inventors of the alphabet were
expert phoneticians or that they were invariably correct in their analysis of
the way in which any particular sound was made; we would expect to find some
errors, particularly where the sounds are exceptionally difficult to analyse
and the differences in the characters and order of the Greek and Latin
alphabets are of significance. The articulatory basis of the alphabet is not
simply a matter of speculation about historical or prehistorical events. I
would argue that one can perceive in the modern alphabet, and in the facility
in reading which it offers, the astonishing speed at which the letter-patterns
are translated into words whose meaning is understood, a peculiar
appropriateness of the alphabet to the sounds of speech.
As a simple example of the way in which the signs are combined one can
consider the letter B. The double-rounded shape of the letter indicates that
the sound is made by pressing the two lips together. If B mirrors the sound
produced in this way with the two lips, P surely equally clearly mirrors the
different sound produced mainly with the top lip. In the modern alphabet the
vertical line in B and P may indicate internal rigidity needed in the mouth
to produce the sounds. Another simple example of the way in which a letter can
be a diagram of the articulation is the letter O. This represents the rounded
position of the lips when the sound is made. The two letters representing
nasal sounds, M and N, are very similar. They resemble each other because the
sounds they represent resemble each other and the ways in which they are
produced are similar. The angular formation of the letters appears
particularly appropriate for the manner of articulation.
Because in an articulatory alphabet the diagrams which constitute the
characters are formed by combining representations of the various speech
organs, it is possible to provide in tabular form a set of characters made up
from a limited number of elements. This may be something the original inventor
of the alphabet perceived, though he would probably have arrived at the
systematisation by a process of trial and error, as I myself did in trying to
replicate the process. The stages in the formation of the articulatory
alphabet are shown in Figures 6 7 and 8.
Figures 6 and 7 show two preliminary stages. In these rough drawings I had
in mind the order and set of speech sounds represented by our current
alphabet. The inventor of the Semitic alphabet may have had in mind the order
and set of speech sounds represented by the Ugaritic alphabet or, less
probably, the set of sounds represented by the Egyptian pseudo-alphabet.
Figure 6 is a set of crude drawings of faces producing different speech
sounds. In some cases these faces might have suggested how articulatory
characters might be formed; in others the inventor (or myself as attempting
to replicate the process) will have realised that these drawings of someone
else speaking ought to be supplemented or replaced by drawings based on
perception of one's own way of producing different speech sounds.
Figure 7 represents a next stage in which drawings of speaking faces would
be reduced to drawings of the mouth and other organs of articulation,
essentially the isolation of the significant parts, the changing parts, of the
previous set of drawings. At this stage the characters become more
diagrammatic. The diagrams concentrate on the mouth, the lips, the nose, the
teeth, the throat, the tongue.
Figure 8 shows the final stage. This is a systematic arrangement of the
complete set of characters with the elements used to form them. Some
explanation and comments are in order. In this section I refer to letters and
characters and speech sounds which they represent - it would anachronistic in
the context of the origin, invention or replication of the alphabet to use
terms such as phonemes,labials, front vowels, etc..
The righthand side of the table shows the articulatory elements from which
the characters on the lefthand side are formed. The elements include rounded
lips, upper and lower lip separately, open mouth, open jaw, throat, nose,
tooth ridge, tongue and breath flow. It might have been right to include as
one of the primitive elements a vertical straight line, a very common feature
of the characters in the Roman alphabet. This would have represented the
stiffness or rigidity observed in the production of a number of consonants,
for example, B P D.
The elements include four forms for the tongue. The tongue as the most
mobile articulatory organ can assume a great variety of forms. In
introspection of one's articulation, it is more difficult to be sure about the
position and shape of the tongue. The tongue may be straight or curled,
pressed up to the palate or retracted, turned to one side. In the table of
characters, differing forms of the tongue element go to form the characters
for R L and Y. Because of difficulty in deciding on the best way of
diagramming the sound represented by L two forms of the character are included
in the table. A variety of forms for characters representing the sound L are
found in ancient alphabets.
The element for the breath shows the direction of the flow of air. The
inclusion of this as a separate element may seem unusual but it is a
noticeable component of a number of speech sounds and obviously of defining
importance for vowels. In the character table, the element is a component of
E and I where it represents a level flow directed forward. In the character
for A, the flow is directed up and forward. The flow of air is a feature of
articulation which the inventor of an alphabet will have observed for some
consonants, as seen in the characters for F TH and X. Two other characters in
which the element for breath flow is included are those representing M and N,
where the direction of flow is shown as from above downwards.
In the table the characters are arranged in the order of the Roman
alphabet with a few characters added to match sounds represented in the Greek
alphabet viz: the characters for theta and omega. It will be seen that for the
most part the characters resemble the Roman forms but some resemble Greek
forms including those for D, F X and TH. The character for Q resembles the
archaic Greek character koppa. Characters corresponding to W and J are not
included; these are late forms produced by differentiation from U and I.
The characters in the table are in some cases, for example, those for A
L H M N Q, are differently aligned, that is with a different aspect, from the
corresponding characters in the Roman alphabet. Semitic and early Greek
alphabets had similar variations in the placing of characters, vertical or
horizontal or vice versa. As the forms of the alphabet settled down and as any
awareness of articulatory origin of the characters was lost, the alignment of
the letter was systematised and perhaps in some cases adjusted to increase the
distinctiveness of the characters, for example, between Greek lambda and
gamma.
For several speech sounds it is difficult even with careful observation
to decide what is the most appropriate diagram to represent the mode of
articulation. Two of the more difficult speech sounds in this respect are
those represented by R and H. The speech sound represented by R has a varying
quality in different languages and in different dialects. In the early Greek
alphabets the characters for R and P often are alike and in Etruscan the sound
was represented by a character very similar to the modern D. It seems
plausible that the form of the Greek pi was adopted to establish
distinctiveness from the character for R, a case where understandably the
inventor's introspective analysis found the greatest difficulty.
H is another sound where it was, and is, difficult to decide on the most
appropriate diagram for the mode of articulation. In the table two forms of
character are shown for H. The Etruscan character for H was very like the
first form in the table, constructed by combining the element for open mouth
with that for rounded lips. The Greek alphabet used the character H for eta
(long E) and used the rough breathing ` for the speech sound H; perhaps the
rough breathing can be seen as a reduced form of the second diagram for H
shown in the table. One of the difficulties with H is in distinguishing its
articulation from those for G and K. In the table two forms of the character
for the sound represented by G are included.
A few comments on the extent to which the characters in the table
generally resemble characters in other familiar alphabets. I have already
mentioned that many of the characters are similar to the Roman characters,
apart from their direction of alignment, and that a few resemble classical
Greek characters not found in the roman alphabet. Most of the characters are
similar to Etruscan forms; I have mentioned the character for H as a
particular case but those for M and N are also very similar. Early Greek forms
of the characters bring out the degree of variation in the alignment of
characters, for example the characters gamma and kappa can be seen placed at
many different angles; in Athens the alpha was placed on its side. In
different locations there was a variety of forms for rho, some resembling the
Roman R, others like the Roman D or P. Comparison can also be made with other
alphabets such as the glagolitic and the runic alphabet. Little close
similarity can be observed - they appear to be independent inventions. The
only broad resemblance of the glagolitic alphabet that strikes me is, at some
distance, to Alexander Bell's Visible Speech!
As I have mentioned earlier, the suggestion in this paper that the
alphabet originated as a representation of articulation is not new, nor is it
novel to propose that our present alphabet still manifests its iconic basis.
I include here relevant extracts from several sources on the articulatory
basis of the alphabet by various writers besides those referred to earlier.
One of the most eminent and industrious in promoting the idea was Sir Richard
Paget, a scientist well-known to those concerned with the origins of language
as a supporter of a gestural theory, specifically the idea that mouth
movements mimic the objects or actions to which words refer:
"I have recently found definite evidence that in Sumerian, and still more
in Greco-Roman writing, the symbolism depended largely on the principle of
unconscious imitation of mouth gestures. Thus in the case of the Greek
alphabet: B represents an outline of the two lips facing to the right, E is
a front view of a mouth showing the tongue between the teeth; þ is a view of
the tongue raised to the palate, as in articulating the consonant D; A is a
similar gesture but made more lightly. Mr. H.B. Walters of the British Museum,
whom I have consulted on the matter, agrees that nearly all the letters of the
Greek alphabet show influence of mouth gestures. I may add that more than
twenty of the letters of our own alphabet still show the same influence.
(Paget, 1929: 224)
There is an interesting discussion in Roy Harris' recent book on the
origin of writing. Though he leaves the question open, and indeed makes some
dismissive remarks about the unlikelihood that there could have been primitive
phoneticians able to anticipate the work of the IPA, his final view seems to
be that it is the absence of any coherent account of the nature of the
iconicity that makes it difficult to believe in an articulatory origin for the
alphabet:
Articulatory iconicity seems much the more promising candidate, [than
auditory mimesis] and has attracted a considerable amount of attention....
Charles Davy [Conjectural Observations on the Origin and Progress of Alphabet
Writing 1772 ]... makes out a case which cannot be dismissed....What emerges
fairly clearly from a survey of claims about the (possible) iconicity of the
alphabet is that they are all based, in one way or another, on reducing
pronunciation to what can be seen or felt concerning the positions or
movements of the articulatory organs ... No one doubts that, within the
inherent limitations imposed by alphabetic notation, it is possible to devise
a system which will 'make speech visible' in the sense claimed by Bell's
title. It will give, in other words, a visible iconic analysis of the
articulatory postures involved in speaking. That is not the question however.
The question is whether alphabetic writing in its original or any of its
traditional forms was in fact designed to function as a system of 'visible
speech'... The doctrine that writing represents speech fudges the issue of
exactly what represents what. Is it the form of the letter P which represents
the outline of the closed lips... if it is not the shape of the closed lips
what else could it be?... [Harris suggests other possibilities] The list of
queries is not intended as an indirect reduction ad absurdum. On the contrary,
it is perfectly possible to propose quite specific answers; the point is that
such answers, or alternatives, must be proposed if the claim that writing
represents speech is to be taken seriously. (Harris, 1986: 93 ff., 102)
Harris includes two illustrations drawn from Davy's account of the
articulatory formation of the alphabetic characters (Harris, 1986: 95- 96).
Davy's account of the formation of A and E is very similar to mine.
Another line of comment relates to occasions on which children have been
asked to produce their own alphabets. If a child can produce a set of
alphabetic characters de novo, then the Semite of 3500 years ago could well
have done the same. There is no reason to think that our ancestors were less
resourceful or less creative in dealing with their current problems than
modern phoneticians and linguists. Gelb has referred to these experiments. He
illustrates them with an excerpt from a writing invented by a school child for
the purposes of secret communication showing resemblances to characters in
many different forms of writing. Gelb also describes an experiment reported
by a Dutch scholar, Johannes de Groot: a nine-year-old girl was asked to
compose an original alphabet and created twenty-six signs of which seven
corresponded exactly to those of the Phoenician alphabet. (Gelb, 1952:
144-146) Driver similarly referred to experiments with children which had
shown what remarkable coincidences resulted from their efforts to create
artificial alphabets. (Driver, 1954: 150)
A few scattered remarks to conclude. If in fact, as I believe, the
alphabet had from its beginning and still has an iconic articulatory basis,
then this may be an important matter to explore in debate about the thorny
subject of teaching children to read. There is a truly enormous volume of
research into the best methods of teaching reading - a good number of years
ago there were 744 column inches under the heading 'Reading' in the
Encyclopedia of Educational Research, probably multiplied several times since
then, and an estimate was that approximately 1000 pieces of published reading
research were being added each year. The volume of research is matched by the
intensity of the debate, or dispute, about the best teaching methods, the
alphabetic, phonic, word, sentence, spelling, syllabic, `look and say',
global, phrase, story, real books.
Children learning to read in England and the United States have
traditionally suffered a good deal of grief. Winston Churchill recorded that
his nurse produced a book called Reading without Tears: "It certainly did not
justify its title in my case"(Diack, 1965:30). In France also there have been
sharp disputes about the best methods. One report was that French supporters
of the `look and say' and phonics methods came to blows. The use of the
alphabet as the first stage in learning to read in schools fell into disuse
early in the century but in the English-speaking countries and in France it
seems that the problem is not the alphabet but the vagaries of the spelling.
In countries with rationalised orthography the problems are less, for example,
reading has not been a great problem in Finnish schools.
If the alphabet in fact can be seen as a set of diagrams of how speech
sounds should be formed, then it becomes a much more useful and interesting
instrument for teaching reading. The case for believing that the alphabet is
something considerably more than a set of arbitrary symbols is strengthened
by the remarkable evidence that some handicapped or retarded children learn
to read before they learn to speak. This apparently is so in the case of some
autistic children (National Autistic Society, 1981: 5) and even more
surprisingly a side effect is that in some instances learning to read helps
these children to begin to speak. In her account of her autistic daughter,
Elly, Clara Park says:
I cannot explain the strange reversal of the natural order of events in
which a child learns speech through the written word. ... The configuration
of letters itself seems to crystallise the word for them, makes them able to
hear its pronunciation, and renders its spelling an inseparable part of its
identity.... The look of a word could be used to help correct the
indistinctness of her pronunciation. (Park, 1972: 213 ff.)
Trevarthen records:
Remarkably the same progress [as for speech] also appears when deaf,
hearing-impaired or hearing children are given early instruction in reading,
an apparently more artificial form of communication, that, nevertheless, can
start as a natural language at the middle of the second year....That is, as
soon as a child can be expected to speak, or sign, single words, that same
child, or one who is partially or profoundly deaf, can learn to read single
words. (Trevarthen, 1990: 350)
In 1886 my grandmother received as the Queen's Prize from the Lords of the
Committee of Council of Education a book on teaching methods (Blakiston 1883).
It recommended that, in teaching children to read by the alphabetic method,
the teacher should "induce them to imitate the movements of their instructor's
lips and tongue, so as to repeat each sound correctly after her". If the
alphabet is a representation of articulation, then this seems very sensible
advice.
The answers may be related. It is proposed that the alphabet originated
in an intellectual sequence similar to that followed by Bell in constructing
his Visible Speech and by Henry Sweet in creating his Organic Alphabet.The
originator of the alphabet used the same kind of introspective analysis of his
own speech sounds and of the manner in which they were articulated. This was
the vital step. The next step, amazingly successful in the case of originator
of the alphabet but less so in practice for Bell and Sweet, was to represent
in terms of visual patterns the differences as he perceived them of the manner
in which he articulated the speech sounds. One way to understand what might
have been involved is to attempt to replicate
Figure 1
The origin of the alphabet
Origin of the Semitic/Phoenician alphabet
An alternative approach?
Figure 3
Figure 4
Figure 5
Replicating the invention
The re-invented alphabet
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
Parallel material
Concluding remarks