INTRODUCTION.


THE ALPHABET.

1. The Origin of Letters.--2. The Phoenician Alphabet and Inscriptions.--
3, The Greek Alphabet. Its Three Epochs.--4. The Medieval Scripts. The
Irish. The Anglo-Saxon. The Roman. The Gothic. The Runic.


1. THE ORIGIN OF LETTERS.--Alphabetic writing is an art easy to acquire,
but its invention has tasked the genius of the three most gifted nations
of the ancient world. All primitive people have begun to record events and
transmit messages by means of rude pictures of objects, intended to
represent things or thoughts, which afterwards became the symbols of
sounds. For instance, the letter _M_ is traced down from the
conventionalized picture of an owl in the ancient language of Egypt,
_Mulak_. This was used first to denote the bird itself; then it stood for
the name of the bird; then gradually became a syllabic sign to express the
sound "mu," the first syllable of the name, and ultimately to denote "M,"
the initial sound of that syllable.

In like manner _A_ can be shown to be originally the picture of an eagle,
_D_ of a hand, _F_ of the horned asp, _R_, of the mouth, and so on.

Five systems of picture writing have been independently invented,--the