Twenty-six Wonders. 

  

"There is no end to the surprises the alphabet will bring if mixed with discretion and read with wondering."

-H. M.Tomlinson

 Consider the alphabet. The symbols of writing in many Western languages. We accept them as an elementary  part of our language just as we do speech. There are, however, over 3,000 languages used today with no written form. Over one-half of all the spoken dialects in the world have no graphic way of writing language. For some people there is no way of recording thoughts, knowledge, or wisdom in their native tongue. There is no way to pass on unique technological skills through writing. Other than the oral traditions, they have no way of accessing their ancient culture. Years from now, no one will be able precisely know what type of people they were.

The Western or Latin alphabet is not the oldest method of writing. Chinese writing is a complex system of thousands of pictographic and ideographic characters. It is the oldest system and has changed little in 4,000 years. The complexity and quantity of characters is the very reason printing with movable type was conceived and then mostly abandoned in China 1,000 years before Gutenberg every printed.

The alphabet has not been the only method of record keeping. The cursive letters of the Arabic language were designed for the swift copying by the Muslim scribes. The Arabic style numerals advanced mathematics beyond anything the Romans knew or understood. The Arabic letters were used to preserve the classic works of Greece and Rome when Europe settled into the thousand year funk known as the Dark Ages.

So where did our abcís come from?  In the ancient world, Cuneiform was used to press arrow shaped marks into clay to form picture words. Egyptian Hieroglyphics was a more detailed form of picture writing. Both of these Bronze Age civilizations laid the foundation  for a Middle Eastern phonographic system that used symbols for sounds, rather than words or ideas. Building on the pictures  between 1800 and 1300 B.C, early alphabets were symbols of the basic sounds represented in an early version of the picture.

The early Greek writing style did not conform to a straight line, but wound around pictures and curved at the edge of the page. This caused some letters to be inverted. The letter A was originally upside down representing an alef or the face of an ox. The upright points were the horns. The letter B was on itís side, with peaks rather than curves, representing the roof of a house.
 
There was no standard form of writing back and forth. The Greeks would write one line left to right and the next right to left in mirror image. The N and R are written wrong-reading in some other writing systems. They called this style boustrophedon meaning as the ox plows the field. This caused some letters to evolve into the reverse form we use today.

Early writing was written without punctuation or even space between words, but it was written for reading aloud. The slow pace of speaking what was read lent itself to adding the proper pauses and inflection. It seems implausible that people did not read silently, but they did not have opportunity to read in private. The reading of large books were community affairs. Remember when the only way to watch a movie was in a theater? It would take further development of the alphabet and other social changes to make silent reading possible and even desirable.

The beautiful Roman capital letters were good for inscribing on a wall, but not so good for writing on paper or for reading. Roman slave scribes slowly evolved a lowercase letter from Roman script and Unical letters. The standard left to right style of writing in straight lines was also a Roman contribution.

After the fall of Rome, illiteracy was dominate and learning was barely preserved in the religious monasteries. Sometimes barely literate monks copied without much knowledge of what they were copying and there was chaos. Charlemagne the Great became concerned and brought in the English scholar, Alcuin of York in 781 A.D. to set order to writing.

Alcuin set up a school and worked to establish standards for writing. These standards were uniform spelling, lower case letters, capitals at the start of a sentence, word spacing, some punctuation, and division into sentences and paragraphs. All of these standards would be refined. Printing encouraged otherstandardizations. The comma was a contribution of Aldus Manutius around 1500 A.D. Typography, type and pagedesigns have lead to  more readable printing.

We honor our technological heritage, but the alphabet is also a special gift from our past. Without it, knowledge would be static from generation to generation. There would be no increases in industry, business, and culture. With it, we can preserve, record, and pass on what we discover to future generations. But there is a problem. Many people canít read. Illiteracy is increasing and those who can read are reading less, and a person who will not read is no better off than one who canít.

Thanks to Martin Popp and the staff of the Museum of the Alphabet, Waxhaw, North Carolina for some of the information in this column. The Museum of the Alphabet is a project of the Summer institutes of Linguistics, and Wycliffe Bible Translators. It is located at the JARRS, Inc. complex in Waxhaw, NC and is open to the public.