Alphabetical (3 page)

When I've texted my son, I put the instrument down on the table next to a newspaper and, let's say, my copy of
Emil and the Detectives
, and I go on watching the TV. Though this all seems seamless, the frontiers of different technologies, different languages, different typefaces, and different uses of alphabets, symbols and codes are all nudging up against each other on my table. The names of the footballers I'm watching on the TV are a coming-together of different uses of letters: the commentator tells us that Cazorla would like us to pronounce his name as
‘Cathorla' with a soft ‘th' as in ‘thorn'. Giroud, the commentator explains, has a ‘d' on the end of his name but we don't say the ‘d', and the ‘G' sounds like the ‘j' in ‘bijou'. The goalkeeper's name is Szczęsny. The commentator explains that the team look like they're ‘playing 4, 4, 1, 1' with Cazorla ‘playing in the hole'. This too is yet another system of signs created partly in language, partly by the movements of the players.

This running of languages and sign-systems in parallel to each other is not new. In the British Museum sits the basalt slab known as ‘the Rosetta Stone'. Though one of its languages – Egyptian hieroglyphs – lay undeciphered for hundreds of years, the stone holds the key to understanding a crucial moment in the history of the alphabet: how human beings invented the idea that squiggles on a surface could indicate the sounds we make to each other in order to express ourselves, to communicate and to make meanings for each other that last as long as the material they are written on. Matching squiggles to sounds is known as the ‘phonetic principle'. It's not known for certain who first invented it, and it's not known whether different groups of people invented it separately or influenced each other. Though this kind of behaviour seems obvious to us, it was not how humans first invented writing. The first writing was a form of drawing. Matching signs to speech comes later.

The history of the alphabet is also a history of how we uncovered that history. The Rosetta Stone is inscribed in three languages: Egyptian hieroglyphs and two kinds of Greek. The script gives out the terms of a decree from the ‘Manifest God, King Ptolemy' – a decree which included that no rower employed in the task of taking priests to the residence of Alexander should be press-ganged into service – a piece of humane legislation that I always spend a moment of pleasure thinking about, unless it was a neat way to prevent the Emperor from being surrounded by potentially recalcitrant and rebellious strong men. In
comparison, the story of how the stone was handled by Europeans is squalid. If ever we were trying to find an example of how language, letters and alphabets can be the subject of rivalries, wars and plunder, the Rosetta Stone does it all.

The British and French invaders of Egypt in the early nineteenth century fought over the stone. Today, people still argue over which of the European scholars who pored over its three languages first cracked the code of the hieroglyphs. The Frenchman Jean-François Champollion is usually given more credit than the Englishman Thomas Young, though Champollion himself gave Young some credit. This overlooks the fact that Ahmad Bakr ibn Wahshiyah, who lived in Egypt in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, wrote a treatise on hieroglyphics, pointing out that the glyphs were both pictorial images and single symbols signifying sounds.

How the international use of letters works across time and place can be seen in the thread of scholarship which links ibn Wahshiyah to Champollion: there was first an Arabic manuscript of the book
Kitab Shawq al-Mustaham
in which ibn Wahshiyah deciphered a number of Egyptian hieroglyphs; there was then a translation of the Arabic manuscript in a book published in English in 1806 by Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall as
Ancient Alphabets and Hieroglyphic Characters Explained, with an Account of the Egyptian Priests, their Classes, Initiation, and Sacrifices in the Arabic Language by Ahmad Bin Abubekr Bin Wahishih
; someone called Silvestre de Sacy – a colleague of Champollion – read this English version of the Arab manuscript; sixteen years later, Champollion's complete decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs appeared. There is, then, the strong possibility that an Arab scholar and expert on magic, statues, agriculture, alchemy, physics and medicine, writing at the same time that King Alfred was trying to get people to read English, may have played a significant part in
unlocking the crucial fact that hieroglyphs were not only pictures but that some of them also represented specific sounds. To grasp how this works, the Egyptians some four thousand years ago did the equivalent of changing a picture of an apple from representing the word we say as ‘apple', to representing the sound ‘a', changing our picture of a ball representing the word we say as ‘ball', to representing the sound ‘b' and so on.

What we don't know for certain is whether the ancient Egyptians were the first to do this, nor whether they passed it on to others. In other words, we cannot be sure that the ancient Egyptian writing is an ancestor of what you're reading now. Around the same time, other peoples living relatively near to the Egyptians were developing scripts that also used phonetic principles – but in different ways. For example, the ancient Sumerians, from what is now present-day Iraq, developed a way of using symbols to represent syllables. An analogy would be if we had a symbol for a bird's beak or ‘bill' based on a picture of a bird's bill. This ‘bill' symbol could be used again and again in a word like ‘building' (where our ‘buil-' sounds the same as ‘bill'), or in ‘possible' (where our ‘-ble' sounds like ‘bill'). Another way to imagine the ‘syllabic principle' is to think of the possibility of us using the ampersand, ‘&', to write ‘hand' as ‘h&'.

What has just taken me a few minutes to describe would have taken people hundreds of years to evolve. Though these breakthroughs lie at the heart of our culture, we can only speculate why people tried to make them. In terms of trade, pictograms are an easier way to translate words because you don't have to use abstract symbols like ‘h' or ‘y' representing sounds in different languages. The pictogram for ‘eye' will work for my word for ‘eye' just as well as for your word for ‘eye', each of which may well sound completely different.

Alphabets are extraordinarily useful to a group of people
speaking the same language, as they can be compressed and combined to indicate almost any sound – and therefore any word – we might want to say, in any combination of phrases, sentences, verses or passages of any length. Inventing alphabets based on the ‘phonetic principle' or the ‘syllabic principle' suggests, therefore, some stability on the part of a group of people speaking the same language. But we shouldn't forget that the Chinese have had an incredible stability in terms of language-use but have not felt it necessary to develop an alphabet. And the Chinese are doing just fine.

The Sumerians and ancient Egyptians were clearly crucial players in the history of alphabets. Their invention and the widespread use of their writings can be seen in a place like the British Museum today, where their writing tells stories, shows prayers, gives instructions on how to pass on to the land of the dead and much more. However, we cannot know definitively whether their knowledge was picked up by the first people we know for certain are the key source for the alphabet I'm using. Moreover, in telling the story of deciphering old inscriptions like the Rosetta Stone (rather than that of the evolution of the alphabet), it is important to mention that scholars transfer a principle they've learned from one script across to another.

The archaeologist who applied what I'll call the ‘ibn Wahshiyah–Champollion' principle of decoding to ancient scripts was a man by the name of Alan Gardiner and he made the breakthrough in 1916 while studying an inscription of symbols from Sinai which he figured did not say, ‘box eye cane cross' but a word made from the initial letter of the Semitic words for ‘box', ‘eye', ‘cane' and ‘cross', making, he thought, the word ‘baalat' or ‘lady'. This piece of writing dates from around 1750
BCE
and it was produced by people who are described by scholars as ‘Semites'.

By the way, if you ever wonder how excited people get
deciphering ancient scripts, you should remember George Smith. Though this young man with no formal education beyond the age of fourteen wasn't the first person to decipher the cuneiform script of the ancient Sumerians, he was responsible for spotting that they wrote about the Flood before the Old Testament writers did. This eureka moment came in 1872 as he pored over a dusty clay tablet, plucked from the desert sands of Iraq, which constituted all that remained from the library of Nineveh. He was so excited by the discovery that he leaped up, ripped off his clothes and ran round the British Museum.

In the inscriptions of the Semitic people, scholars see the first certain forebears of the alphabet you're looking at. It's possible that they adopted the phonetic principle from the Egyptians, the Sumerians and others, but not certain. It's possible that they incorporated some of the symbols – possible but not certain.

Following the Semites, the next group in the family tree that leads to what you are reading now are the Phoenicians who originated in what is modern Lebanon. They are known to have been a highly inventive, active, trading people, working their way all round the Mediterranean and beyond, speaking a language, it's thought, akin to ancient Hebrew. By about 1000
BCE
, they were using a twenty-two-letter alphabet probably inherited from the Semites. Anyone who remembers or knows their Roman history will remember Carthage and the Carthaginians. For some of us, Carthage was an inky word in our Latin exercise books, but it was indeed a real place founded by Phoenicians near to present-day Tunis in Tunisia. We would have hundreds of Phoenician books today if it wasn't for the fact that the Romans sacked Carthage and burned the Phoenicians' library. The history of storing meanings is not always a pretty one.

The Phoenicians used abstract versions of objects to indicate letters: a bifurcated (horned?) sign was an ‘ox' (in their language
‘aleph'), and on down through the words for ‘house', ‘stick', ‘door' and ‘shout' up to ‘tooth' and ‘mark'. You don't have to be all that fanciful to see that in many of the cases, the sign had evolved from the object and that the corresponding letter came to signify the first sound of the name of that object.

One other point: Phoenicians had no letters for vowels. These days, such an alphabet tends not to be called an alphabet, or even a ‘consonantal alphabet'; it's called an ‘abjad' – which is a transliteration of the Arabic word corresponding to ‘alphabet'. The idea of trying to use an alphabet that has no vowels may seem to some surprising or difficult. If you can read written Arabic this is neither surprising nor difficult as it has no vowels either. Ancient Hebrew, another descendant from Semitic writing, didn't have vowels either, though reforms have added them.

A quick digression (the first of many in this book) on Hebrew vowels: my family were not religious, so I didn't attend Hebrew classes. However, one day I was ‘spotted' by a boy at my school who ‘claimed me'.

‘You are, aren't you?' he said.

‘What?' I said.

‘Jewish,' he said.

‘I think so,' I said, though I wasn't 100 per cent sure. So I went home and asked my parents if I was Jewish.

‘Why do you ask?' said my father.

(Remember here, in the kind of Jewish life I was part of, every comment gives rise to a question.)

‘Because Peter Kelner says that I am,' I said.

‘Oh yes,' said my father. ‘And because he said so, you should believe him?'

‘He says I should go to Hebrew classes with his mother,' I said.

‘Did he? Why's that?'

I don't remember how or why my secular parents, who had spent some time separating themselves off from the religious traditions, enabled me and encouraged me to go to Hebrew classes with Mrs Kelner.

To be honest, I don't remember much of what was taught. Yet, I can distinctly remember Mrs Kelner teaching us some Hebrew vowel sounds.

‘Look at that one,' she said, and she pointed at a letter that looked a bit like a 7 with a dot over the top.

‘Now look at that one,' she said, and she pointed at another 7 with a dot halfway down the downstroke of the seven.

‘How do you tell the difference between those two? I'll tell you. If a football lands on your head, you say, “Oh!” If it lands in your kishkes [your ‘guts'] you say, “Ooo”.'

‘Oh' and ‘Ooo'. That's just about the extent of my Hebrew alphabet, and given that one of the things that people know about ancient Hebrew is that it has no vowels, it's ironic that it's vowels I remember.

End of digression.

The Phoenicians didn't have the advantage of Mrs Kelner and her vowel sounds though it is thought that they were just as creative in their teaching of the alphabet. That's why they retained ‘ox', ‘house', ‘wheel' and the rest – as popular memory devices or mnemonics. Though people with my education may well have ended up thinking of the Phoenicians as a people in Latin exercise books, waiting patiently for the Romans to obliterate them and their library, we can look at the Phoenicians' letters and see the objects they derive from; or we can then look at our own letters and trace them back to these objects. Here is the Phoenician alphabet, its name, its sound and the modern letter in the alphabet it corresponds to.