인간의 생활과 문자

Abstract

The invention of writing is as much important as that of speech in the history of civilization. Nor is the importance of writing ended with its first development. The invention of printing had brought a new stage in the history of script. The alphabet system of writing from the Romans have given an influence which it is impossible to measure in shaping our civilization Ancient writers held various opinions about the origin of writing and the alphabet. Generally it was said that the Sumerian invented the pictographic signs(cuneiform letter) and devised a method of using these to render syllables, and one century later or so the Egyptians had also devised their own system of hieroglyphs. But it was the merit of the western Semites that they knew the importance of Egyptian discovery. Semites discarded the whole cumbrous machinery of ideographic and syllabic scripts of hieroglyphs and made each sound being represented by only one sign. Thus the alphabet was developed in Palestine and perfected on the Phoenician coast. A Semitic consonant-based-alphabet transmitted to Greece would in some respects be redundant, in others defective. The symbols of identical sounds might be transmitted without change, but superflous letters would disappear, and new letters would be evolved by need. In the Greece, the Semi-consonants and guttural breaths became vowels, the remaining letters were improved in form. The letters added by the Greeks are the five which come at the end of the alphabet after T. Their alphabetic postion is due to the employment of the letters as numerals, which made it needful not to disturb the old alphabetic order. The Latin alphabet is essentially identical with the Greek. But some innovations took place. The chief innovation was the development go G. The Anglo-Saxon alphabet was from the Roman letters by early Christian missionaries from Ireland in order to make it roughly a phonetic representation of the speech of their converts.