“Bread crumbs”(perhaps how you got here)

The following was written for the use of a friend who was interested in certain Medieval things.

Comments on European Alphabetic Scripts

Thursday, January 22, 2009

There is nothing particularly original or controversial below; it is simply a summary of the alphabetic scripts of which I am aware, together with a few short comments. The only thing even slightly unusual below is comprised of a few short remarks on the writing medium used by the various alphabets.

General Nature Of Alphabetic Scripts

There are, of course, many forms of writing - at least hundreds, probably thousands of different scripts have been employed over the roughly five thousand years of written records. The vast family of alphabetic scripts stands out, however, by virtue of its immense geographical and chronological spread. No other family of scripts is even close, although some very important languages have used one or more of those non-alphabetic scripts (the most important non-alphabetic script is certainly Chinese, at least in terms of antiquity and the great number of users).

By the term "alphabetic" script we mean a script that represents sounds, approximately one phoneme at a time. Thus the cuneiform syllabaries, which also represented sounds (and some other things, like words), are not alphabetic, since the primary linguistic entity that a cuneiform symbol represented was a syllable.

It appears that the alphabets (with the minor exceptions of a few specially devised alphabets employed in fantasies or other special contexts) are all related, all deriving from a single original. This original alphabet seems to have appeared somewhere in the Sinai Peninsula (or perhaps in Egypt or Palestine), perhaps as early as the first centuries of the second millennium BCE. (The fact that the earliest examples we seem to possess of alphabetic characters are found in the Sinai does not mean that they originated there - the origins could have been elsewhere. It is possible that what we have in the Sinai is only an accident of preservation.) It is generally believed that the so-called "Proto-Sinaitic" alphabet is somehow related to Egyptian, which would already have been a well-established script (or, more accurately, family of scripts) by the end of the Third Millennium BCE. Unfortunately, it is not clear how the early alphabetic script is related to Egyptian hieroglyphics (or the other scripts related to the famous hieroglyphics, especially "hieratic" and "demotic). Perhaps the early alphabets are some form of imitation of hieroglyphics, but we do not know.

The names of the alphabetic characters (still fairly well preserved in Hebrew - "aleph," "beth," "gimmel," and so on) seem to suggest that the early symbols worked similarly to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, where the basic principle was that a symbol represented a word. Although this theory is widespread, it is also not necessarily the case - for one thing, it is clear that the alphabetic symbols were rarely (if ever) used logographically; instead, they seem to have been employed acrophonically. That is, "beth," for example (the word meant "house") was used to represent the sound with which the name of the symbol began - the voiced labial stop , /b/. This, in turn, raises the possibility that the names by which we know the early alphabetic symbols were supplied as mnemonics - in other words, we do not know which came first, the sound or the name of the symbol (there are other possibilities, too - the names might have been borrowed in some unknown way from another language, such as Egyptian, perhaps even replacing an earlier name or no name).

In the following, the term "phoneme" can be taken (informally only) to mean one of a language's significant sounds. This is not the same as a single letter - for example, in English the hissing ("sibilant") sound in "dose" (as in a dose of cough syrup) is usually thought of by linguists as /s/. But in the plural ("doses") the second letter s corresponds to the phoneme /z/. In English, there might once have been a time when both of the s's in "doses" were pronounced the same way - but languages always change with the passage of time. In English , then, the way the word "doses" is spoken has changed, but the spelling has stayed the same as it once might have been. (As a general rule, there is probably no language for which any common writing system perfectly reflects the way the words are spoken; some languages have spelling rules that are pretty close to reflecting speech - Italian, for instance - and some are quite imperfect - English, for example.)

In any case, the early alphabets more or less followed the principle of using one symbol to represent one phoneme; apparently, however, the only phonemes that did this status were consonants. The writing of vowels appears to have been developed later, perhaps first in the course of efforts to write non-Semitic languages, such as Greek. The "success" of Greek in using alphabetic characters to represent vowels seems to have inspired other efforts, such as the use of a complex system of diacritics, to write vowels (the best-known such systems are seen today in Hebrew and Arabic), or the use of symbol-diacritic combinations to turn the alphabet into a syllabary (as in Ethiopic and its relatives). Punctuation and capitalization came much later; the best known systems of punctuation probably originated mainly in Medieval Europe; capitalization in the modern sense is fundamentally a development that took place in the early days of printing.

Early Alphabets

As we've already hinted, it seems that all alphabetic scripts ultimately trace their origins back to a single alphabet, usually called Proto-Sinaitic. This appears to have been an alphabet meant to be drawn (perhaps with a brush and ink, or perhaps with chalk or charcoal) on a flat surface. If it was inspired by Egyptian writing, this was quite natural - by the end of the Third Millennium BCE, Egyptian was written in several ways, but almost always by drawing lines on a flat surface (in the case of some monumental inscriptions, the lines were actually incised, but the shapes of symbols corresponded well to shapes made with a brush and ink or paint). We do not quite know for sure what languages were written with the earliest alphabetic symbols - probably at least some of the writing records an early ancestor of the languages that eventually became "Canaanite," "Hebrew," and "Aramaic."

In at least one place, however, there was at least one competing writing technology - the impression of wet clay tablets with a stylus (probably often made of reed, but sometimes wood or metal). This was the technology of cuneiform writing, originating in the country that today is most of Iraq and part of western Iran. There were several versions of a cuneiform writing system that was widely known and used for a great deal of international correspondence (mainly in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages); the scribes in at least one place (modern Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit) adapted this same technology by creating a new version of the alphabet that could readily be written on clay tablets. This Ugaritic alphabet does not, at first glance look much like other alphabets with which we are familiar, but it is a true alphabet (representing only the consonants - it is an early alphabet, after all, dating from roughly the second half of the Second Millennium BCE). To my knowledge, this is the first major version of an alphabet that makes a serious adaptation to a previously unused writing technology.

The Ugaritic alphabet also shows another distinctive trait of the alphabet: most (but not all) alphabets had the custom of making beginners learn the letters in a fixed order. From Ugarit we have the order of the Ugaritic alphabet; it is not quite the same as that of the English alphabet or the Hebrew alphabet, but one can see a broad similarity, with differences due mainly to the fact that the Ugaritic scribes adapted the alphabet to the sounds that they felt necessary to represent. In this trait of adaptability we see another important characteristic of all alphabets - perhaps because the symbols are comparatively few, it is fairly easy to adapt the alphabet to new languages. It is thus no accident that the chief internationally accepted set of symbols used to represent the sounds of all languages is the International Phonetic Alphabet, a script that possesses far more symbols than any other common alphabet, but still an alphabet, its letters still showing recognizable similarities to the alphabets usually employed to write languages like Latin, French, English, and even Greek or Russian.

As the Bronze Age drew to a close (roughly around 1000 BCE in many places), there were many competing systems of writing in the Western World (by which we mean mainly the territory today called the "Middle East" or "Near East" and the lands around the Mediterranean). The alphabets were only comparatively small features of the scribal scene. But as the First Millennium passed, almost all of the other scripts used in this large area were replaced by various alphabets.

The Alphabets In Classical Antiquity

We do not know exactly when the Greeks began to use an alphabet, but most scholars agree that this happened sometime early in the First Millennium BCE. (Note that Greek had already been written, using the "Linear B" syllabary.) The adoption of the alphabet by the Greeks was accompanied by a new usage: some symbols (such as the traditionally first letter, called "alpha" in Greek) were employed to represent vowels.

In the first half of the First Millennium, Greek cities expended a great deal of effort to establish "colonies" in many places around the Mediterranean Sea. These colonies inevitably encountered new languages, for many of which the alphabet was adapted. Examples include Etruscan (not an Indo-European language), Latin, Oscan, and Umbrian (the latter three being Indo-European). The more consonantally-oriented "Phoenician" alphabet was also spread, particularly to Carthage. Also in this period we have the spread of the alphabet to the south and east of its former area; in the Arabian Peninsula there were at least two scripts that would be well known later - in the far south, the "Old South Arabic" version, and in the main part of Arabia, the early ancestor of the alphabet used today to write Arabic and several other languages. The family of scripts used in the region of modern Ethiopia seems to be derived from Old South Arabic.

Many of these developments, especially the spread of the alphabet eastwards from the alphabet's old homeland in the region of modern Israel and Palestine, either began or were greatly expanded after the conquests of Alexander the Great (thus the eastern development of the alphabet belongs mainly to the fourth through second centuries BCE). The use of the alphabet to write Egyptian (thus supplanting the older scripts) also belongs to this "Hellenistic" era. Egyptian written with one of the several versions of the alphabet is typically called "Coptic"

Almost all of the Classical alphabets are designed primarily to be written with some form of pen-and-ink technology; often brushes were used, rather than pens, but the principle is the same - a flat surface is required to receive the ink. In Classical times the main kind of flat surface was papyrus, although parchment (whose very name derives from that of the ancient city of Pergamum) was also known. In the days of the Roman Empire, papyrus seems to have been comparatively cheap and widely available, except probably for the northern peripheral regions of the Empire.

This is, however, not to say that the alphabets were always written on something like paper (paper itself came much later). Both Greek and Latin, for instance, had highly-developed versions of their alphabets for use in monumental inscriptions. In Roman times (and probably much earlier) there was also the widespread use of wax tablets in which the writer drew the letters using a metal or wood stylus.

We have a very interesting set of documents from roughly the high point of the Empire (the "Antonine" era, late First Century CE to the beginning of the Third Century) that show another and potentially important adaptation of the alphabet. At Vindolanda (northern England). These documents (very quotidian in nature) are written with ink on a wooden shingle - evidently at Vindolanda papyrus was expensive. The script used is essentially the same as that known from Latin documents on papyrus in more southern regions of the Empire.

The use of wood shingles at Vindolanda points the way towards something important: the possibility of a version of the alphabet that is more readily adapted to locally available materials. We do not know how widespread the use of ink on wood might have been during the Empire, but wood was plentiful and cheap in the northern regions. This suggests the adaptation that did, in fact, occur: versions of the alphabet were devised that were suitable for writing using the point of a knife or even a specially sharpened syllabus. The letters were cut into the wooden surface. The scripts of this family seem to have originated in northern Italy (or perhaps even in the Alpine regions) and are today called "runes." We do not know the date of this development, but it may well have been in late Hellenistic times.

Medieval Writing in Western Europe

The scripts of the Romans are not too difficult to categorize. We have:

1. A very old script ("Early Roman") that closely resembles pre-Classical Greek scripts. This resemblance is not surprising, since it is almost certain that the Romans got their writing either directly from some Greek source, or from an intermediary (such as the Etruscans) that got their writing from the Greeks. There are not a great many remains of this script.
2. A monumental script ("Old Roman Monumental") that probably appeared around the time of the First Punic War and was used for monumental inscriptions until roughly the beginning of the 1st Century BCE.
3. A cursive script ("Old Roman Cursive") derived not from the old monumental script but from the older Early Roman.
4. The famous "Classical Monumental" script as found in such famous monuments as those of Trajan.
5. The "Rustic Capitals" script, intended for writing with pen and ink on papyrus or a similar medium. This started as nothing more than an adaptation of the Classical Monumental script.
6. The "Late Roman Cursive" script derived from the Old Roman Cursive. This script is well-attested in many unpretentious documents, including the Vindolanda materials.

By roughly 250 CE the last three of these constituted the main scripts used for writing Latin. The advent of Christianity, however, seems to have given impetus to a new script, also intended for use with ink on paper. This was the famous "Uncial" script, whose distinctively rounded forms seem to have been inspired by contemporary Greek models. From roughly five or six generations later, we begin to get a variety of other scripts, such as "Half Uncial," "Insular," and so on; from some of these derive our modern Western alphabets.

Often ignored by scholars whose interests are surviving Medieval manuscripts are two important scripts that probably dominated writing in what is today called "Northern Europe." These are a family of "runic" scripts and what seems to be either a very small family or perhaps only one script with a couple of common variants - "Ogham" (spelled many different ways).

The runes are clearly intended to be written with a knife-point or sharp stylus, incised into a fairly resistant surface - wood. Occasionally we also find runes used on stone, but only rarely are they written with pen on parchment or a similar flat surface suitable for ink. Runic scripts seem to date from sometime in the Hellenistic era, probably towards the 1st Century (BCE or CE - we cannot now be very certain). They were used for monumental inscriptions (although not too often, to judge from what remains), for private records and communications , and (perhaps only later) for various "magical" purposes. As a general rule, the Druids (priests of the Celtic peoples) forbade writing of any religious material, but it is possible that, if anyone contravened the prohibition, it was with the use of runes. More likely, however, is the use of Greek or Latin alphabets. In any case, runic is known from early in the Christian era and survived until the Renaissance (which began later in the North than in the Mediterranean).

Ogham is an extremely specialized version of the alphabet used for what may be the most bizarre written medium in the World - writing on the edges of wood or stone surfaces, perhaps even on staves or sticks. There are a very few examples of Ogham drawn with ink on parchment in Medieval documents dealing with peculiar writings. Ogham is known mainly from Ireland, with some examples from Britain (hardly surprising); its usage seems to have been roughly contemporary with the runic alphabets.

A curious speculation: from Anglo-Saxon times until the Renaissance, the English kings kept the records of their treasury (the "Exchequer") in the form of "tallies," notched sticks that were split, half being given to someone (an "accountant") who had to account for funds, while the other half was retained by the Exchequer. Although the numeric symbols encoded as notches in these sticks are not Ogham, one wonders whether there might have been some inspiration from Ogham (or even if the inspiration was the other way around, for we do not know the origins of the tally system).
 

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