145. Hebrew and Arabic

Only a small part of the history of the alphabet was unfolded in Europe, where the seemingly so different forms of writing that have been discussed are after all only fairly close variants of the early Greek letters. In Asia the alphabet underwent more profound changes.

The chief modern Semitic alphabets, Hebrew and Arabic, are considerably more altered from the primitive Semitic or Phœnician than is our own alphabet. The Hebrew letters were slowly evolved, during the first ten centuries after Christ, under influences which have turned most of them as nearly as possible into parts of squarish boxes. B and K, M and S, G and N, H and CH and T, D and V and Z and R are shaped as if with intent to look alike rather than different. Arabic, on the other hand, runs wholly to curves: circles, segments of circles, and round flourishes; and several of its letters have become identical except for diacritical marks. If we put side by side the corresponding primitive Semitic, the modern English, the Hebrew, and the Arabic letters, it is at once apparent that in most cases English observes most faithfully the 3,000-years old forms. The cause of these changes in Hebrew and Arabic is in the main their derivation from alphabets descended from the Aramæan alphabet, a form of script that grew up during the seventh century B.C. in Aram to the northeast of Phœnicia. The Aramæans were Semites and therefore kept to the original value of the Phœnician letters more closely than the Greeks and Romans. On the other hand, they employed the alphabet primarily for business purposes and rapidly altered it to a cursive form, in which the looped or enclosing letters like A, B, D were opened and the way was cleared for a series of increasing modifications. Greek and Roman writing, on the other hand, were at first used largely in monumental, dedicatory, legal, and religious connections, and preserved clarity of form at the expense of rapidity of production.

One feature of primitive Semitic, most Asiatic alphabets retained for a long time: the lack of vowel signs. In the end, however, representation of the vowels proved to be so advantageous that it was introduced. Yet the later Semites did not follow the Greek example of converting dispensable consonantal signs into vocalic ones. They continued to recognize consonant signs as the only real letters, and then added smaller marks, or “points” as they are called, for the vowels. These points correspond more or less to the grave, acute, and circumflex accents which French uses to distinguish vowel shades or qualities, é, è, ê, and e, for instance; and to the double dot or diæresis which German puts upon its “umlaut” vowels, as to distinguish ä (= e) from a. There is this difference, however: whereas European points are reserved for minor modifications, Hebrew and Arabic have no other means of representing vowels than these points. The vowels therefore remain definitely subsidiary to the consonants; to the extent of this deficiency Hebrew has adhered more closely to the primitive Semitic system than have we.

The reason for this difference lies probably in the fact that Hebrew and Arabic have retained virtually all the consonants of ancient Semitic. Hence the breaths and stops could not be dispensed with, or at least such was the feeling of their speakers. In the Indo-European languages, these sounds being wanting, the transformation of the superfluous signs into the letters needed for the vowels was suggested to the Greeks. The step perfecting the alphabet was therefore taken by them not so much because they possessed originality or specially fertile imagination, as because of the accident that their speech consisted of sounds considerably different from those of Semitic. Perhaps the Greeks once complained of the unfitness of the Phœnician alphabet, and adjusted it to their language with grumblings. Had they been able to take it over unmodified, as the Hebrews and Arabs were able, it is probable that they would cheerfully have done so with all its imperfection. In that case they, and after them the Romans, and perhaps we too, would very likely have gone on writing only consonants as full letters and representing vowels by the Semitic method of subsidiary points. In short, even so enterprising and innovating a people as the Greeks are generally reputed to have been, made their important contribution to the alphabet less because they wished to improve it than because an accident of phonetics led them to find the means. Such are the marvels of human invention when divested of their romantic halo and examined objectively.

146. The Spread Eastward: the Writing of India

The diffusion of the alphabet eastward from its point of origin was even greater than its spread through Europe. Most of this extension in Asia is comprised in two great streams. One of these followed the southern edge of the continent. This was a movement that began some centuries before Christ, and often followed water routes. The second flow was mainly post-Christian and affected chiefly the inland peoples of central Asia.

India is the country of most importance in the development of the south Asiatic alphabets. The forms of the Sanskrit letters show that they and the subsequent Hindu alphabets are derivatives, though much altered ones, from the primitive Semitic writing. Exactly how the alphabet was carried from the shore of the Mediterranean to India has not been fully determined. By some the prototype of the principal earliest Indian form of writing is thought to have been the alphabet of the south Arabian Sabæans or Himyarites of five or six hundred years B.C. As the Arabs were Semites, and as there was a certain amount of commerce up and down the Red Sea, it is not surprising that even these rather remote and backward people had taken up writing. Between south Arabia and India there was also some intercourse, so that a further transmission by sea seems possible enough. Another view is that Hindu traders learned and imported a north Semitic alphabet perhaps as early as during the seventh century, from which the Brahmi was made over, from which in turn all living Indian alphabets are derived. Besides this main importation, there was another, from Aramæan sources, which gave rise to a different form of Hindu writing, the Kharoshthi or Indo-Bactrian of the Punjab, which spread for a time into Turkistan but soon died out in India.

147. Syllabic Tendencies

One trait of Indian alphabets leads back to their direct Semitic origin: they did not recognize the vowels. The Hindus speaking Indo-European were confronted with the same difficulty as the Greeks when they took over the vowelless Semitic alphabet. But they solved the difficulty in their own way. They assumed that a consonantal letter stood for a consonant plus a vowel. Thus, each letter was really the sign for a syllable. The most common vowel in Sanskrit being A, this was assumed as being inherent in the consonant. For instance, their letter for K was not read K, but KA. This meant that when K was to be read merely as K, it had to be specially designated: something had to be done to take away the vowel A. A diacritical sign was added, known as the virama. This negative sign is a “point” just as much as the positive vowel points of Hebrew; but was used to denote exactly the opposite.

There are of course other vowels than A in Sanskrit. These were represented by diacritical marks analogous to the virama. Thus while this is a diagonal stroke below the consonant, U is represented by a small curve below, E by a backward curve above, AI by two such, and so on.

If a syllable had two consonants before the vowel, these were condensed into one, the essential parts of each being combined into a more complex character. This was much as if we were to write “try” by forcing t and r into a special character showing the cross stroke of the t and the roll or hook of the r, and superposing a diæresis for the vowel. This process reduced every syllable to a single though often compound letter. If the syllable ended in a consonant, this carried over as the beginning of the next syllable. Even the end consonant of a word was written as the first letter of the next. According to the Sanskrit plan, “the dog is mad” would be rendered “the do gi sma d-.”

Obviously, there is something unnaturally regular, a systematic artificiality, about such a scheme. Love of system cropped out otherwise. The Hindus devised a new symbol—mainly by differentiation of old ones—for every sound that they had and Semitic lacked. Thus they doubled the number of their letters. Then they rearranged their order on a phonetic and logical basis. All sounds made against the back palate were brought into one group; those formed against the fore-palate, gums, and teeth came after; the lip sounds last. Within each of the groups the letters followed one another in a fixed order according to their method of production—voiceless stops always first, nasals always last.

The result of these innovations was that the Hindu alphabets diverged much more from the Semitic original than did ours. This perhaps was really to be expected, since writing entered India by long leaps between peoples that were not in intimate relations. Also, by the time the alphabet first reached them, the Hindus, in the isolation of their remote peninsula, had already worked out an advanced and unique type of civilization. This fact must have predisposed them to make over any imported invention in conformity with their established habits.

148. The East Indies: Philippine Alphabets

The spread of the Hindu alphabet within India, over southeastern Asia, and into the East Indian archipelago, cannot be followed here because it is an intricate story, interwoven with the history of Brahmanism and Buddhism. It may be said that in general, with the chief exception of China, Hindu writing followed where Hindu religion penetrated. But it may be illuminating to touch briefly on one of the extensions.

In the early centuries after Christ, Hindus began to reach the East Indies, especially Sumatra and Java. Here they established principalities or kingdoms and their religion. Many arts were also imported by them, such as iron working, batik dyeing, sculpture, drama, and writing. From perhaps the sixth to the fifteenth centuries, the Malaysian population of Java lived under a heavy layer of Hindu culture (§ 104, 126, 262), and literacy evidently became fairly widespread. Greater or less portions of this culture were transported to the other East Indian islands and with them went writing. In the Philippines, the Spaniards of the sixteenth century found several related alphabets, one to each of the principal nationalities, which seem derived from Bengal some eight hundred years before.

The Malayan languages are unusually simple in their array of sounds. Hence the greater part of the elaborate Sanskrit alphabet was discarded by them. But the salient characteristics of Sanskrit writing were retained. A consonant was read as consonant plus A. Points were provided if the consonant was to be read with other vowels. Of such points, the Philippine alphabets employed only two. One, put above the consonant, served indiscriminately for I and E, the other, below, for U and O. The position of the points connects them with the Sanskrit vowel signs. In this way the Philippine languages were adequately rendered with a set of about twelve consonantal letters, three for the independent vowels, and two vowel points.

At the time of the Spanish discovery, the native Philippine alphabets were already meeting Arabic writing, which had shortly before been introduced in the southern islands with Mohammedanism. The Spaniards of course brought the Roman alphabet. Under this double competition the use of native writing soon began to decay. The most advanced of the Filipino nationalities, such as the Tagalog and Bisaya, have long since given up their old letters. Yet it has recently been discovered that two varieties of the native writing still survive—both of them among backward tribes: the Tagbanua of Palawan and the Mangyan of Mindoro. Here in the jungle, among half clothed savages living under rude thatches and without firearms or government, the remotest descendants of the ancient Sanskrit alphabet linger.

Three widely different descendants of the primitive Semitic alphabet have therefore met in this archipelago. One, beginning its journey some twenty-five hundred years ago, traveled via Arabia and northern India, probably reaching the Philippines by 800 A.D. The second evolved in the Semitic homeland, finally poured out of northern Arabia with Mohammedanism, was carried across India to the Malay Peninsula, and thence leaped across the sea to Borneo and the Philippines about 1,400 A.D. The third followed the longest journey: from the Phœnicians to the Greeks, to southern Italy, to Rome, to Spain, and, after Columbus, to Mexico, and then across the Pacific ocean to Manila shortly before A.D. 1,600.

149. Northern Asia: the Conflict of Systems in Korea

The history of the central and north Asiatic alphabets is complex. It may be summed up in the statement that Aramæan derivatives of the primitive Semitic writing, evolving in and near Syria, in the six or seven centuries before the birth of Christ, were carried east and northeast from one people to another. One of the modifications of Aramæan, the Estrangelo Syriac, was transported by a sect of heretical Christians, the Nestorians, to the Uigurs and Mongols, from whom the Manchus derived their system.

The farthest extension of the alphabet in Asia was to the shores of the Pacific ocean, in Korea. Korean writing however seems to be derived from an Indian source, through Tibetan or perhaps Pali, the sacred language and script of the Southern branch of Buddhism; hence to be only a remote collateral relative of the neighboring Manchu. In Korea, the spread of the alphabet was checked, not through any inherent flaws or weakness of age, but by the competition of a totally different system of writing: that of the Chinese.

Chinese writing is not alphabetic at all. To some extent it does represent sounds. But it represents syllables or words, not letters; and it represents them by the rebus method. The basis of Chinese writing is ideographic. It is therefore a modified form of picture writing, and theoretically pertains to an early stage, almost comparable in principle to Egyptian hieroglyphs.

In a conflict between such a primitive system and a truly alphabetic one, the latter should of course prevail on account of its much greater efficiency and simplicity. Actually, however, the Korean alphabet did not triumph but barely managed to maintain an existence alongside Chinese. The cause was a familiar one: the tremendous social conservatism of the human mind.

When the native alphabet obtained its hold in Korea, it was confronted by an overwhelming Chinese influence. The court, the government, the institutions, official religion, all activities of people of fashion and importance, were modeled after Chinese examples. The man who could not write and read Chinese characters was eliminated from polite society and advancement. This was only natural. The civilization of China is one of the most ancient and greatest in the world, and the Koreans were a smaller people and close neighbors. Western civilization was thousands of miles away, and it was only now and then that a driblet from it penetrated to the eastern edge of Asia. On one side then stood the undoubted practical advantage of the alphabet from the West; on the other, the momentum of the whole mass of Chinese culture. The outcome was that the nationally Korean and true alphabet became something that shopkeepers and low people made use of; a thing easy to learn and more or less contemptible. But laws and documents and books of higher learning were written in Chinese characters, which innumerable Koreans for generation after generation spent years of their lives in mastering.

If the human mind were really rational, if it operated rationally only a tenth as much as it fondly believes, it would not do awkward and difficult things after a simpler and more effective means to the same end had been put within its reach, as was the case in this Korean situation. Another principle beyond mere outright inertia is operative here. This is the tendency of culture elements which have for some time been associated, often only by accident, to form an interlocked aggregation or “complex.” Once such a complex or cluster has acquired a certain coherence, it survives with a tenacity independent of the degree of inherent or logical connection between its elements. The fact that ideographs were associated with Chinese religion, literature, and institutions, constituted them part of what may be called the Chinese complex. The mass of this Chinese complex far overbalanced the slight and scattering Western influences. The alphabet drifted into Korea as an isolated fragment, and was promptly borne down by the weight of the elaborate and closely knit culture aggregate of Chinese origin. This brute fact, and not any superior reasonableness or intrinsic merit of one system or the other, determined the issue between them.

In the same way the “complex” that we know as Western civilization—Christianity and collars, science and picture films, factory labor and democracy, fine and base all tangled together—is to-day crushing the breath out of ancient and exotic cultures. We like to call the process “Progress” because that is more comforting than to view it as the rolling of a fate beyond our control.