As to the mode in which letters were invented, some clew is afforded by some of the early Hebrew and the Phoenician characters, which evidently aimed, although very rudely, like the drawing of very young children, to represent the object which the name of the letter signified. Thus the earliest Alpha has some vague re- semblance to an ox's head, Gimel to a camel'-, back, Daleth to the door of a tent. Vav to a hook or peg. Again, tie- written letters, called respectively, Lamed (an ox-goad), Ayin (an eye), Qoph (the back of the head!. Resb or Rosh (the head), and Tav (a cross), are all efforts, more or less successful, to portray the things signified by the name-. [| is >.ii,i that this is equally true of Egyptian phonetic hieroglyphics; hut. however tin- may be, there is no difficulty in under- standing in this way the formation of an alphabet; when the idea of representing the component sounds or half-sounds of a word by tiuures was once conceived. But the original idea of thus representing Bounds,
though peculiarly felicitous, was by no means obv n
and millions of men have lived and died w tthoul its oc- curring to any one of them.
It may not be unimportant to observe that, although
so many letters of the Greek alphabet have a auing
in Ilelirew or Phoenician, yel their (.reek names are not in the liehrew or Phoenician, bul in the Aramaic form. There is a peculiar form of the noun in Aramaic
called by grammarians the status emphaticus, in which the termination a (Xt) is added to a noun, modifying it according to certain laws. Originally this termination was probably identical with the definite article "ha;" which, instead of being prefixed, was subjoined to the noun, as is the case now with the definite article in the Scandinavian languages. '1'his form in ;'i is found to exist in the oldest specimen of Aramaic in the Bible, Yegar sahaduthd, in Gen. xxxi. 17. where sahaduth, testimony. i- used by I.ahan in the status emphaticus. Now it is worthy of note that the names of a considera- ble proportion of the "Cadmeian letters" in the Greek alphabet are in this Aramaic form, such as Alpha. Beta, Gamma, Delta, Eta, Theta, [ota, Kappa. Lambda; and although this fact by itself is not sufficient to support an elaborate theory on the subject, it seem- in favor, as far a- it -.h-. of the conjecture that when the Greeks originally received the knowledge of letters, tic names
by which the Several letters were taught to them were
Aramaic. It has been suggested, indeed, by Gesenius, that the Greeks themselves made the addition in all these cases, in order to give the words a Greek termi- nation, as ■•they did with other Phoenician words, as mekt, pa\5a, mini, |/a/3Xa." If. however, a list is ex- amined of Phoenician words naturalized in Greek, it will not he found that the ending in a has been the favorite mode of accommodating them to the Greek language. For example, of the words specified by Bleek tuny in das .1. T. p. 69) as having been communicated through the Phoenicians to tie Greeks (see above), it is remarkable that only four end in a in Greek which have not a similar termination in Hebrew; and of these four one is a late Alexandrian translation, and two ate names of musical instruments, which, very probably. may first have been communicated to Greeks, through Syrians, in Asia Minor. Under any circumstances, the proportion of the Phoenician words which end in <r in Greek is too small to warrant the inference that any common practice of the Greeks in this respect will ac- count for the seeming fact that nine out of the sixteen Cadmeian letters arc in the Aramaic status emphaticus. The inference, then fore, from their endings in a re- mains unshaken. Still this must not he regarded in any way as proving that the alphabet was invented by those who spoke the Aramaic language. This is a wholly distinct question, and far more obscure; though
much dl ference on the point is due to the opinion of Gesenius, who, from the internal evidence of the names
ol the Shemitic letters, has arrived at the conclusion that they were invented by the Phoenicians (Palao- t/raphie, p. ■.".»! i. The strongest argument of Gesenius against the Aramaic invention of the letters is that, al- though doubtless many of the names arc both Aramaic and liehrew. some of them are not Aramaic at least not in the liehrew signification; while the Syrians use other words to express the same ideas. Thus rrx in Aramaic means only 1000, and not an ox: the word for •■door'' in Aramaic is not DPI, but "" : while the six following names of Cadmeian letters are not Aramaic: ■". v^. =-•;. xs (Syr. mb), r-- in.
As this obviously leads to the conclusion thai the Hebrews adopted Phoenician as their own language, or, in other words, that what i- called the Hebrew lan- guage was in fact •■the language of Canaan," as a prophet called it i Isa. xix. 18), and this not merely po- etically, hut literally and in philological truth; and as this is repugnant to some preconceived notions respi ct- ing the peculiar people, the question arises whether the Israelites might not have translated Canaanitish names into Hebrew. On this hypothesis the names nou ex- isting in the Bible for persons and places in the laud of Canaan would not he the original names, hut merely the translations of those name-. The answer to this question is, 1. That there i~ not the -1,-1,1, , direct mention, nor auv indirect trace, ia the Bible, of anv