The Origin and Progress of the Art of Writing; A Connected Narrative of the Development of the Art in Its Primeval Phases in Egypt, China, and Mexico ... and Its Subsequent Progress to the Present Day (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1855 Excerpt: ... a question which we have not at present the means of solving. Homer, or the earliest transcribers of his poems, only used the twenty letters above named; and it is evidently an after-thought of his critics, and not his own, that his poem is divided into twenty-four books, to celebrate the twenty-four letters of the new Greek alphabet, since he only knew twenty. The subsequent addition of the last four Z, H, Y, and Q, may probably belong to a period when the Greek letters had assumed their final form, as they have not yet, being discovered among the letters of the ancient Pelasgio-Phoenicio characters. If Simonides, of Ceos, was the first to make use of these new characters, their introduction may date about 500 to 520 B.C.; but these are details which there is not room to discuss fully in the present volume. It is said, however, by some that they were not added till after the time of Thucydides, who, like Homer, though more than four centuries later, only used the previous twenty. It may be stated here that the H, or long e, was sometimes used as an aspirate, as in writing ixarov HEKATON; and this is perhaps the place to speak of the aspirates generally. In the iEolian dialect, the character conveying the sound of V, F, or W, was used as an aspirate, which character, from its formation resembling two gammas placed one over the other, r, was called the digamma or double gamma. It was used in such words as kantfa, written in the iEolic /-jwtga; and instead of Uo-j the iEolians wrote u/ou; from which the Latin, in many respects nearly allied to the iEolian dialect, has vespera and ovum. Such is a slight outline of the origin and gradual formation of the Greek alphabet, as described by the learned Benedictines and more recent philologists, --a descri...