Volume I Part 4 (1/2)
A brief a.n.a.lysis of speech sounds will aid us in understanding the real nature of the syllabary. Let us take for consideration the consonantal sound represented by the letter b. A moment's consideration will make it clear that this sound enters into a large number of syllables. There are, for example, at least twenty vowel sounds in the English language, not to speak of certain digraphs; that is to say, each of the important vowels has from two to six sounds. Each of these vowel sounds may enter into combination with the b sound alone to form three syllables; as ba, ab, bal, be, eb, bel, etc. Thus there are at least sixty b-sound syllables. But this is not the end, for other consonantal sounds may be a.s.sociated in the syllables in such combinations as bad, bed, bar, bark, cab, etc. As each of the other twenty odd consonantal sounds may enter into similar combinations, it is obvious that there are several hundreds of fundamental syllables to be taken into account in any syllabic system of writing. For each of these syllables a symbol must be set aside and held in reserve as the representative of that particular sound. A perfect syllabary, then, would require some hundred or more of symbols to represent b sounds alone; and since the sounds for c, d, f, and the rest are equally varied, the entire syllabary would run into thousands of characters, almost rivalling in complexity the Chinese system. But in practice the most perfect syllabary, Such as that of the Babylonians, fell short of this degree of precision through ignoring the minor shades of sound; just as our own alphabet is content to represent some thirty vowel sounds by five letters, ignoring the fact that a, for example, has really half a dozen distinct phonetic values. By such slurring of sounds the syllabary is reduced far below its ideal limits; yet even so it retains three or four hundred characters.
In point of fact, such a work as Professor Delitzsch's a.s.syrian Grammar(6) presents signs for three hundred and thirty-four syllables, together with sundry alternative signs and determinatives to tax the memory of the would-be reader of a.s.syrian. Let us take for example a few of the b sounds. It has been explained that the basis of the a.s.syrian written character is a simple wedge-shaped or arrow-head mark. Variously repeated and grouped, these marks make up the syllabic characters.
To learn some four hundred such signs as these was the task set, as an equivalent of learning the a b c's, to any primer cla.s.s in old a.s.syria in the long generations when that land was the culture Centre of the world. Nor was the task confined to the natives of Babylonia and a.s.syria alone. About the fifteenth century B.C., and probably for a long time before and after that period, the exceedingly complex syllabary of the Babylonians was the official means of communication throughout western Asia and between Asia and Egypt, as we know from the chance discovery of a collection of letters belonging to the Egyptian king Khun-aten, preserved at Tel-el-Amarna. In the time of Ramses the Great the Babylonian writing was in all probability considered by a majority of the most highly civilized people in the world to be the most perfect script practicable. Doubtless the average scribe of the time did not in the least realize the waste of energy involved in his labors, or ever suspect that there could be any better way of writing.
Yet the a.n.a.lysis of any one of these hundreds of syllables into its component phonetic elements--had any one been genius enough to make such a.n.a.lysis--would have given the key to simpler and better things. But such an a.n.a.lysis was very hard to make, as the sequel shows. Nor is the utility of such an a.n.a.lysis self-evident, as the experience of the Egyptians proved. The vowel sound is so intimately linked with the consonant--the con-sonant, implying this intimate relation in its very name--that it seemed extremely difficult to give it individual recognition. To set off the mere l.a.b.i.al beginning of the sound by itself, and to recognize it as an all-essential element of phonation, was the feat at which human intelligence so long balked. The germ of great things lay in that a.n.a.lysis. It was a process of simplification, and all art development is from the complex to the simple.
Unfortunately, however, it did not seem a simplification, but rather quite the reverse. We may well suppose that the idea of wresting from the syllabary its secret of consonants and vowels, and giving to each consonantal sound a distinct sign, seemed a most c.u.mbersome and embarra.s.sing complication to the ancient scholars--that is to say, after the time arrived when any one gave such an idea expression. We can imagine them saying: ”You will oblige us to use four signs instead of one to write such an elementary syllable as 'bard,' for example.
Out upon such endless perplexity!” Nor is such a suggestion purely gratuitous, for it is an historical fact that the old syllabary continued to be used in Babylon hundreds of years after the alphabetical system had been introduced.(7) Custom is everything in establis.h.i.+ng our prejudices. The j.a.panese to-day rebel against the introduction of an alphabet, thinking it ambiguous.
Yet, in the end, conservatism always yields, and so it was with opposition to the alphabet. Once the idea of the consonant had been firmly grasped, the old syllabary was doomed, though generations of time might be required to complete the obsequies--generations of time and the influence of a new nation. We have now to inquire how and by whom this advance was made.
THE ALPHABET ACHIEVED
We cannot believe that any nation could have vaulted to the final stage of the simple alphabetical writing without tracing the devious and difficult way of the pictograph and the syllabary. It is possible, however, for a cultivated nation to build upon the shoulders of its neighbors, and, profiting by the experience of others, to make sudden leaps upward and onward. And this is seemingly what happened in the final development of the art of writing. For while the Babylonians and a.s.syrians rested content with their elaborate syllabary, a nation on either side of them, geographically speaking, solved the problem, which they perhaps did not even recognize as a problem; wrested from their syllabary its secret of consonants and vowels, and by adopting an arbitrary sign for each consonantal sound, produced that most wonderful of human inventions, the alphabet.
The two nations credited with this wonderful achievement are the Phoenicians and the Persians. But it is not usually conceded that the two are ent.i.tled to anything like equal credit. The Persians, probably in the time of Cyrus the Great, used certain characters of the Babylonian script for the construction of an alphabet; but at this time the Phoenician alphabet had undoubtedly been in use for some centuries, and it is more than probable that the Persian borrowed his idea of an alphabet from a Phoenician source. And that, of course, makes all the difference. Granted the idea of an alphabet, it requires no great reach of constructive genius to supply a set of alphabetical characters; though even here, it may be added parenthetically, a study of the development of alphabets will show that mankind has all along had a characteristic propensity to copy rather than to invent.
Regarding the Persian alphabet-maker, then, as a copyist rather than a true inventor, it remains to turn attention to the Phoenician source whence, as is commonly believed, the original alphabet which became ”the mother of all existing alphabets” came into being. It must be admitted at the outset that evidence for the Phoenician origin of this alphabet is traditional rather than demonstrative. The Phoenicians were the great traders of antiquity; undoubtedly they were largely responsible for the transmission of the alphabet from one part of the world to another, once it had been invented. Too much credit cannot be given them for this; and as the world always honors him who makes an idea fertile rather than the originator of the idea, there can be little injustice in continuing to speak of the Phoenicians as the inventors of the alphabet. But the actual facts of the case will probably never be known. For aught we know, it may have been some dreamy-eyed Israelite, some Babylonian philosopher, some Egyptian mystic, perhaps even some obscure Cretan, who gave to the hard-headed Phoenician trader this conception of a dismembered syllable with its all-essential, elemental, wonder-working consonant. But it is futile now to attempt even to surmise on such unfathomable details as these. Suffice it that the a.n.a.lysis was made; that one sign and no more was adopted for each consonantal sound of the Semitic tongue, and that the entire c.u.mbersome mechanism of the Egyptian and Babylonian writing systems was rendered obsolescent. These systems did not yield at once, to be sure; all human experience would have been set at naught had they done so. They held their own, and much more than held their own, for many centuries. After the Phoenicians as a nation had ceased to have importance; after their original script had been endlessly modified by many alien nations; after the original alphabet had made the conquest of all civilized Europe and of far outlying portions of the Orient--the Egyptian and Babylonian scribes continued to indite their missives in the same old pictographs and syllables.
The inventive thinker must have been struck with amazement when, after making the fullest a.n.a.lysis of speech-sounds of which he was capable, he found himself supplied with only a score or so of symbols. Yet as regards the consonantal sounds he had exhausted the resources of the Semitic tongue. As to vowels, he scarcely considered them at all. It seemed to him sufficient to use one symbol for each consonantal sound.
This reduced the hitherto complex mechanism of writing to so simple a system that the inventor must have regarded it with sheer delight. On the other hand, the conservative scholar doubtless thought it distinctly ambiguous. In truth, it must be admitted that the system was imperfect.
It was a vast improvement on the old syllabary, but it had its drawbacks. Perhaps it had been made a bit too simple; certainly it should have had symbols for the vowel sounds as well as for the consonants. Nevertheless, the vowel-lacking alphabet seems to have taken the popular fancy, and to this day Semitic people have never supplied its deficiencies save with certain dots and points.
Peoples using the Aryan speech soon saw the defect, and the Greeks supplied symbols for several new sounds at a very early day.(8) But there the matter rested, and the alphabet has remained imperfect. For the purposes of the English language there should certainly have been added a dozen or more new characters. It is clear, for example, that, in the interest of explicitness, we should have a separate symbol for the vowel sound in each of the following syllables: bar, bay, bann, ball, to cite a single ill.u.s.tration.
There is, to be sure, a seemingly valid reason for not extending our alphabet, in the fact that in multiplying syllables it would be difficult to select characters at once easy to make and unambiguous.
Moreover, the conservatives might point out, with telling effect, that the present alphabet has proved admirably effective for about three thousand years. Yet the fact that our dictionaries supply diacritical marks for some thirty vowels sounds to indicate the p.r.o.nunciation of the words of our every-day speech, shows how we let memory and guessing do the work that might reasonably be demanded of a really complete alphabet. But, whatever its defects, the existing alphabet is a marvellous piece of mechanism, the result of thousands of years of intellectual effort. It is, perhaps without exception, the most stupendous invention of the human intellect within historical times--an achievement taking rank with such great prehistoric discoveries as the use of articulate speech, the making of a fire, and the invention of stone implements, of the wheel and axle, and of picture-writing. It made possible for the first time that education of the ma.s.ses upon which all later progress of civilization was so largely to depend.
V. THE BEGINNINGS OF GREEK SCIENCE
Herodotus, the Father of History, tells us that once upon a time--which time, as the modern computator shows us, was about the year 590 B.C.--a war had risen between the Lydians and the Medes and continued five years. ”In these years the Medes often discomfited the Lydians and the Lydians often discomfited the Medes (and among other things they fought a battle by night); and yet they still carried on the war with equally balanced fort.i.tude. In the sixth year a battle took place in which it happened, when the fight had begun, that suddenly the day became night.
And this change of the day Thales, the Milesian, had foretold to the Ionians, laying down as a limit this very year in which the change took place. The Lydians, however, and the Medes, when they saw that it had become night instead of day, ceased from their fighting and were much more eager, both of them, that peace should be made between them.”
This memorable incident occurred while Alyattus, father of Croesus, was king of the Lydians. The modern astronomer, reckoning backward, estimates this eclipse as occurring probably May 25th, 585 B.C. The date is important as fixing a mile-stone in the chronology of ancient history, but it is doubly memorable because it is the first recorded instance of a predicted eclipse. Herodotus, who tells the story, was not born until about one hundred years after the incident occurred, but time had not dimmed the fame of the man who had performed the necromantic feat of prophecy. Thales, the Milesian, thanks in part at least to this accomplishment, had been known in life as first on the list of the Seven Wise Men of Greece, and had pa.s.sed into history as the father of Greek philosophy. We may add that he had even found wider popular fame through being named by Hippolytus, and then by Father aesop, as the philosopher who, intent on studying the heavens, fell into a well; ”whereupon,” says Hippolytus, ”a maid-servant named Thratta laughed at him and said, 'In his search for things in the sky he does not see what is at his feet.'”
Such citations as these serve to bring vividly to mind the fact that we are entering a new epoch of thought. Hitherto our studies have been impersonal. Among Egyptians and Babylonians alike we have had to deal with cla.s.ses of scientific records, but we have scarcely come across a single name. Now, however, we shall begin to find records of the work of individual investigators. In general, from now on, we shall be able to trace each great idea, if not to its originator, at least to some one man of genius who was prominent in bringing it before the world. The first of these vitalizers of thought, who stands out at the beginnings of Greek history, is this same Thales, of Miletus. His is not a very sharply defined personality as we look back upon it, and we can by no means be certain that all the discoveries which are ascribed to him are specifically his. Of his individuality as a man we know very little. It is not even quite certain as to where he was born; Miletus is usually accepted as his birthplace, but one tradition makes him by birth a Phenician. It is not at all in question, however, that by blood he was at least in part an Ionian Greek. It will be recalled that in the seventh century B.C., when Thales was born--and for a long time thereafter--the eastern sh.o.r.es of the aegean Sea were quite as prominently the centre of Greek influence as was the peninsula of Greece itself. Not merely Thales, but his followers and disciples, Anaximander and Anaximenes, were born there. So also was Herodotas, the Father of History, not to extend the list. There is nothing anomalous, then, in the fact that Thales, the father of Greek thought, was born and pa.s.sed his life on soil that was not geographically a part of Greece; but the fact has an important significance of another kind. Thanks to his environment, Thales was necessarily brought more or less in contact with Oriental ideas. There was close commercial contact between the land of his nativity and the great Babylonian capital off to the east, as also with Egypt. Doubtless this a.s.sociation was of influence in shaping the development of Thales's mind. Indeed, it was an accepted tradition throughout cla.s.sical times that the Milesian philosopher had travelled in Egypt, and had there gained at least the rudiments of his knowledge of geometry. In the fullest sense, then, Thales may be regarded as representing a link in the chain of thought connecting the learning of the old Orient with the nascent scholars.h.i.+p of the new Occident.
Occupying this position, it is fitting that the personality of Thales should partake somewhat of mystery; that the scene may not be s.h.i.+fted too suddenly from the vague, impersonal East to the individualism of Europe.
All of this, however, must not be taken as casting any doubt upon the existence of Thales as a real person. Even the dates of his life--640 to 546 B.C.--may be accepted as at least approximately trustworthy; and the specific discoveries ascribed to him ill.u.s.trate equally well the stage of development of Greek thought, whether Thales himself or one of his immediate disciples were the discoverer. We have already mentioned the feat which was said to have given Thales his great reputation. That Thales was universally credited with having predicted the famous eclipse is beyond question. That he actually did predict it in any precise sense of the word is open to doubt. At all events, his prediction was not based upon any such precise knowledge as that of the modern astronomer.
There is, indeed, only one way in which he could have foretold the eclipse, and that is through knowledge of the regular succession of preceding eclipses. But that knowledge implies access on the part of some one to long series of records of practical observations of the heavens. Such records, as we have seen, existed in Egypt and even more notably in Babylonia. That these records were the source of the information which established the reputation of Thales is an unavoidable inference. In other words, the magical prevision of the father of Greek thought was but a reflex of Oriental wisdom. Nevertheless, it sufficed to establish Thales as the father of Greek astronomy. In point of fact, his actual astronomical attainments would appear to have been meagre enough. There is nothing to show that he gained an inkling of the true character of the solar system. He did not even recognize the sphericity of the earth, but held, still following the Oriental authorities, that the world is a flat disk. Even his famous cosmogonic guess, according to which water is the essence of all things and the primordial element out of which the earth was developed, is but an elaboration of the Babylonian conception.
When we turn to the other field of thought with which the name of Thales is a.s.sociated--namely, geometry--we again find evidence of the Oriental influence. The science of geometry, Herodotus a.s.sures us, was invented in Egypt. It was there an eminently practical science, being applied, as the name literally suggests, to the measurement of the earth's surface.
Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians were obliged to cultivate the science because the periodical inundations washed away the boundary-lines between their farms. The primitive geometer, then, was a surveyor. The Egyptian records, as now revealed to us, show that the science had not been carried far in the land of its birth. The Egyptian geometer was able to measure irregular pieces of land only approximately. He never fully grasped the idea of the perpendicular as the true index of measurement for the triangle, but based his calculations upon measurements of the actual side of that figure.
Nevertheless, he had learned to square the circle with a close approximation to the truth, and, in general, his measurement sufficed for all his practical needs. Just how much of the geometrical knowledge which added to the fame of Thales was borrowed directly from the Egyptians, and how much he actually created we cannot be sure. Nor is the question raised in disparagement of his genius. Receptivity is the first prerequisite to progressive thinking, and that Thales reached out after and imbibed portions of Oriental wisdom argues in itself for the creative character of his genius. Whether borrower of originator, however, Thales is credited with the expression of the following geometrical truths:
1. That the circle is bisected by its diameter.