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ALPHABET

from the very beginning of our records. Unfortunately, as yet no record is preserved which can with any probability be dated earlier than the 7th century B.C., and the Phoenician influence had by then nearly ceased. How long this influence lasted we cannot tell. If in Crete a system of writing of an entirely different nature had been developed seven or eight centuries before, there must have been some very important reason for the entire abandonment of the old method and the adoption of a new. In Crete, at least, the excavations show that the old civilization must have ended in a social and political cataclysm. The magnificent palace of Minos—there seems no reason to withhold from it the name of the great prince whom Thucydides recognized as the first to hold the empire of the sea—perished by the flames, and it evidently had been plundered beforehand of everything that a conqueror would regard as valuable. The only force in Greek history which we know that could have produced this change was that of the Dorian conquest. As everywhere in the Peloponnese, except at Argos, there seems to have been a sudden break with the earlier civilization, which can have been occasioned only by the semi-barbarous Dorian tribes, so the same result seems to have followed from the same cause in Thera. The Dorians apparently were without an alphabet, and consequently when Phoenician traders and pirates occupied the place left vacant by the downfall of Minos’s empire, the people of the island, and of the sea coasts generally, adopted from them the Phoenician alphabet.[1] The Greeks who migrated to Cyprus, possibly as the result of the Dorian invasion, adopted a syllabary, not an alphabet (see Plate; also Writing.) That the alphabet was borrowed and adapted independently by different places not widely separated, and that the earliest Greek alphabets did not spread from one or a few centres in Greek lands, seem clear (a) from the different Greek sounds for which the Phoenician symbols were utilized; (b) from the different symbols which were employed to represent sounds which the Phoenicians did not possess, and for which, therefore, they had no symbols. The Phoenician alphabet was an alphabet of consonants only, but all Greek alphabets as yet known agree in employing A, E, I, O, Y as vowels. On the other hand, a table of Greek alphabets[2] will show how widely divergent the symbols for the same sound were. Except for a single Attic inscription (see Plate), the alphabets of Thera and of Corinth are the oldest Greek alphabets which we possess. Yet at Corinth alongside , which is found for the so-called spurious diphthong ει (i.e. the Attic ει, which does not represent an Indo-European ει, but arises by contraction, as in φιλεῖτε, or through the lengthening of the vowel sound as the result of the loss of a consonant, as in εἰρημένος for ερημένος) the short ε sound is represented by B; ι is found at Corinth in its oldest form , and also as , while in Thera it is . In Thera the w sound of digamma () was entirely lost, and therefore is not represented. Both Thera and Corinth employ in the earliest inscriptions for ζ, not ξ, though in both alphabets the ordinary use as ξ is adopted, no doubt through the influence of trade with other states. On the other hand. at Cleonae. which is distant not more than 8 or 9 m. from Corinth, an ancient inscription written βουστροφηδόν has recently been discovered, which shows that though Cleonae for B wrote , like the Corinthian , and, as at Corinth, wrote for a vowel sound, the vowel thus represented was not short and long e (ε and η) as at Corinth, but η only, as in , (χρῆμα μή). Here represents ε, and the spurious diphthong is represented by , as in (εἶμεν, Doric infinitive = εἶναι), a form which shows that ι has at Cleonae the more modern form Ι as distinguished from the Corinthian .[3]

Regarding three other questions controversy still rages. These are: (a) how Greek utilized the four sibilants (Shin, Samech, Zain and Zade), which it rook over from the Phoenician; (b) what was the history of development in the symbols for φ, χ, ψ, ω (the history of ξ belongs to both heads); (c) the history of the symbol for the digamma .

In the Phoenician alphabet Zain was the seventh letter, occupying the same position and having the same form approximately () as the early Greek Z, while in pronunciation it was Greek use of Phoenician sibilants. a, voiced s-sound; Samech () followed the symbol for n and was the ordinary s-sound, though, as we have seen, it is in different Greek slates at the earliest period z as well as x; after the symbol for p came Ẓade (), which was a strong palatal s, though in name it corresponds to the Greek ζῆτα; while lastly Shin (W) follows the symbol for r, and was an sh-sound. The Greek name for the sibilant (σίγμα) may simply mean the hissing letter and be a derivative from σίγμα; many authorities, however, hold that it is a corruption of the Phoenician Samech. Unfortunately, it is not clear how many sibilants ere distinguished in Greek pronunciation, nor over what areas a particular pronunciation extended. There is, however, considerable evidence of the view that Greek ss representing the sound arising from κy, χy, τy, θy was pronounced as sh (ṣ), while ζ representing gy, dy was pronounced in some districts zh (ẓ).[4]

On an inscription of Halicarnassus, a town which stood in ancient Carian territory, the sound of σσ in Άλικαρνασσέων is represented by , as it is also in the Carian name Panyassis (ΠανυάΤιος, genitive), though the ordinary is also found in the same inscription. The same variation occurs at the neighbouring Teos and at Ephesus, while the coins of Mesembria in Thrace show regularly and , where represents the sound which resulted from the fusion of θy, and which appears in Homer as σσ in μέσσος, while in later Greek it becomes μέσος.[5] This symbol is in all probability the early form of the letter which was known to the Greeks as San (σάν) and in modern times as Sampi, and which is utilized as the numeral for 900 in the shape According to Herodotus (i. 139), San was only the Dorian name for the letter which the Ionians called Sigma. This would bring it into connexion with the Phoenician W (Shin), which, turned through a right angle, is possibly the Greek , though some forms of Ẓade on old Hebrew coins and gems () equally resemble the Greek letter. From other forms of Sade, however, the other early form of σ, viz. , is probably derived. The confusion is thus extreme: the name Ẓade assimilated in Greek to the names ἦτα and θῆτα becomes ζῆτα, though the form is that of Zain; the name of Samech is possibly the origin of Sigma, while the form of Samech is that of which has not taken over a Phoenician name. It is probable that the form is an abbreviation in writing from right to left of the earlier , and of the four stroke . That the confusion of the sibilants was not confined to the Greeks only, but that pronunciation varied within a small area even among the Semitic stock, is shown by the difficulty which the Ephraimites found in pronouncing “shibboleth” (Judges xii. 6).

For the history of the additional symbols which are not Phoenician, we must begin with Y. There is no Greek alphabet in which the symbol is not represented.History of the digamma. But the Phoenician form corresponding to it is the consonant w, and occupies the position of the Greek digamma as sixth in the series. Whence did the Greeks obtain the digamma? The point is not clear, but probably the Greeks acted here as they did in the case of the vowel i and the consonant y, adopting the consonant symbol for the vowel sound. As, however, except in Cyprus, Pamphylia and Argos, the only y sound which survived in Greek--

  1. ↑ In an excellent summary of the different views held as to the origin of the alphabet (Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. xxii, first half, 1901), Dr J. P. Peters agrees (pp. 191 fl.) that the best test is the etymology of the names of the letters. He shows that twelve of the letter-names are words with meanings [in the northern dialects of Semitic], all of them indicating simple objects, six of the twelve being parts of the body. The objects denoted by the other six names—ox, house, valve of a door, water, fish and mark or cross—clearly do not belong to any people in a nomadic state, but to a settled, town-abiding population. . . . Six of the letter-names are not words in any known tongue, and appear to be syllables only. Four letter-names are triliterals, and resemble in their form Semitic words.” As 11 of the 12 which have meanings are to be found in the Assyrian-Babylonian syllabaries, he suggests a possible Babylonian origin. Different views with regard to some of these symbols are expressed by Lidzbarski, Ephemeris für semitische Epigraphik, ii. pp. 125 ff. (1906). The earliest tradition of the names is discussed by Nöldeke in his Beiträge zur semitischen Sprachwissenschaft (1904), pp. 124 fl.
  2. ↑ See, for example, the tables at the end of Roberts’s Introduction to Greek Epigraphy (1887); or Kirchhoff’s Studien zur Geschichte des grieschischen Alphabets (4th ed. 1887); or Larfeld’s Handbuch der grieschischen Epigraphik, vol. i. (1907).
  3. ↑ Cp. Fränkel, Corpus inscriptionum Graecarum Pelopennesi, i., No. 1607.
  4. ↑ See Witton, in American Journal of Philology, xix. pp. 420 ff., and Lagercrantz, Zur griechischen Lautgeschichte (Upsala, 1898).
  5. ↑ See Foat, “Tsade and Sampi” (Journal of Hellenic Studies, xxv. pp. 338 ff., xxvi. p. 286). A number of ingenious points often uncertain are raised by A. Gercke, “Zur Geschichte des ältesten griechischen Alphabets” (Hermes, xli., 1906, pp. 540 ff.).
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