Language History Overview
excerpts from the works of
Dr. Micheal Crafton
Department of English
State University of West Georgia
Carrollton, Georgia
(Spring 2000)

While we acknowledge that writing is secondary in the general sense, it is nonetheless an important part of the history of our language, one that without some overview any course on this subject would be incomplete.

The Stages of Writing

In a general history of writing, we normally sort out the basic stages of writing as follows:

Pictographic

Ideographic

Logographic

Phonographic

Syllabary

Alphabetic

These basic stages account for most histories of writing. As you might guess, the earliest phase was picture drawing, and we can see that clearly in the glyph writing of the early Egyptians and the Mayans and Aztecs. The simplest form of this writing is that the picture equals the thing referred to. For example, the following sign """ would equal scissors.

The ideographic mode of writing develops when abstract ideas are represented by symbols. So for example """ followed by "//" might mean "scissors sharp." Thus, the abstraction for sharp could be attached to other pictograms.

As this form develops it takes on the form of logography; that is, every sign equals a word and its meaning, not sound. In English we still have the sign "&" and "@" to indicate words that have no phonetic value. This then is the ideographic-logographic method of writing. Chinese developed just this system and the ancient Sumerians, to whom is given the credit for inventing writing about 3200 BC, developed a form of this which they inscribed in clay tables using an abstract script called cuneiform.

Late cuneiform and late hieroglyphics both began to develop a phonographic system. That is, logograms developed attached sound value that could then be used to indicate a name, a proper name. In fact, historians believe that the earliest phonograms were rebuses to indicate the proper name of the owner of some property that was being catalogued by Sumerian scribes. The same thing is said of Egyptian cartouches, the oval shaped enclosure within which glyps are read in their phonetic value to indicate a proper name. (These make popular necklaces nowadays.)

Phonographic systems usually develop into one of two types, a syllabary or alphabet. A syllabary is a system, Hebrew is a good example, wherein each symbol represents only a consonant sound. The corresponding vowels are either indicating by diacritical marks or they simply must be known. There is a very interesting history of the words for god - Yaweh versus Jehovah - based upon this important point. The gist is that only the illiterate would pronounce the Hebrew letters for God as Jehovah because they would not know the corresponding vowels to attach to each consonant.

An alphabetic script on the other hand contains letters for both consonants and vowels.

The History of the English Alphabet

Our alphabet traces backwards to the Romans, then the Greeks, then the Phoenicians, then the ancient Semites.

The fundamentals of the story are that the Semitic-Phoenician scrip can be traced to various pictographic glyphs, but essentially the Semitic syllabary was taken over by the Greeks who found many of the consonant signs unusable because Greek did not use these sounds and therefore used the letters to indicate vowel sounds which the Semitic syllabary did not use.

The first two letters of the alphabet demonstrate this adequately. The first letter ‘aleph, the Semitic sign for a glottal fricative was not a sound in Greek, thus the letter was used to indicate the vowel "a" and hence from ‘aleph to alpha.

The second sign of Semitic, corresponding to Hebrew "beth" (pronounced bet) did correspond to consonant sound in Greek, so it was adopted to indicate b, hence beta. Therefore, the first two letters of the Greek system, alpha and beta, were combined to indicate the name for the whole script, alphabet. (Could the ancient Greeks have guessed that they were going to contribute to an even more famous canned soup by Campbell’s Soup?)

The Greeks of course created some new characters, chi, phi, omega, upsilon, psy, and zi; however, the Romans adopted two numerals from the Greek script to represent sounds, the digamma or F, and the koppa, or Q.

A similar thing occurred then when the Romans adopted the Greek alphabet. (The Romans actually got the alphabet from the Etruscans, but we don’t have to be that specific.) That is, the Romans had no need for the specialized characters the Greeks had created, and so they were left out. What remains then is 23 of the 26 letters of today’s alphabet. Missing are "j" and "u" and its parallel "w."

Writing comes to the English island mainly from Roman hands but with some mixture of Germanic runes. First of all, the Romans brought the alphabet to England when the dominated the island from 53 ad to 413 ad, or so. Writing with the Roman alphabet was maintained after the departure of the Romans by Christian scribes, particularly the Irish. Thus the earliest manuscript style is called the Insular hand because it was developed in Ireland.

Next came the Runes. The runes, or futhorc, is basically the Roman alphabet, but arranged differently and with very different glyphs. For example, the commonly used thorn, or þ, is a rune that was adapted by the Anglo-Saxon scribes. Then, Anglo-Saxon scribes took over the Insular style and added a few runes, the thorn, the wynn, and some innovations designed to refer to sounds in the runes, the ash, the eth. Likewise, the Anglo-Saxons developed their own distinctive style to the f,g,r,s, and t, particularly the s.

In later medieval times, "i" and "j" come to be distinguished as do "u" and "v" and double "u."

English is often cited for being one of the most difficult languages to learn because of its idiomatic and quirky nature. The truth is that all languages have this feature; however, the spelling of English is particularly difficult. The examples provided in the sections on the spelling of English consonants, vowels, diphthongs, vowels before "r," and unstressed vowels will show you the variety of spelling, a feature that makes phonics teaching problematic, and will help drive home the principles of IPA transcription.

The amusing subject of spelling pronunciation.

I remember being embarrassed by involved the game of Monopoly. If you are familiar with the game, then you know one of the railroads is called Reading. As a kid in the South, far from Pennsylvania, I pronounced that word exactly as it looked, as in the acting of reading a book. Only later did I learn that it is the name of a town and Reading is pronounced to rime with "bedding," hence "redding railroad."

The Development of the Alphabet