WRITING is the art of fixing thoughts in a palpable and lasting shape, so as to make them known to others. There are two principles employed in this process, either separately or jointly—viz. ideographism and phonetism. An ideograph is either s. picture of the object the idea of which is to be conveyed, or, at a later stage, some sym bol which stands, by common consent, for the object, in which case it is called symbol ism. Phonetism, on the other hand, is either syllabism—i.e., a combination of consonants and vowels which form a word, or component parts of it—or alphabetism, a system that further breaks up the syllables into their single component parts of vowels and consonants. All systems of writing seem to have originated in ideographism, and to have gradually arrived at phonetism. The pictorial mode of ideography gradually led, as indicated, to the symbolical mode. The former, also called kyriological (Gr. kyrios, principal, proper, the opposite of metaphorical or symbolical) writing, contents itself with representing only bodily things, either by fully or partly depicting them, or by merely indicating them by some special characteristic. The latter—the symbolical mode—represents abstract things in accordance with their similarity to corporeal sub jects, as in the hieroglyphs of later Egyptian times. Examples of the real delineations of the subjects, or parts of them, which have been replaced by conventional signs, we find at an early period in Egypt, as well as with the Aztecs, with the primitive Assyri ans, in ancient China, and in Guiana. Phonetism here no longer aims at a delineation of subjects or symbols, but of the sounds by which these objects are conveyed to the mind. The first step in phonetic writing is, as we said, the syllabic, which by degrees becomes alphabetical. Difficult though it be in many instances to fix accurately the original ideographic meaning of many of the letters now in use, there is yet absolutely no doubt as to their having once been mere pictures of certain things to which a mean ing was attached, the sound of which was in some shape connected with the present value of the letter. Our knowledge of Phenician, whence our alphabet is directly
derived, and of its cognate dialects, enables us, in many instances, to trace them back to their primitive source. Thus, our A was originally depicted as the head of an ox, r likeness to which may still be traced in its Phenician form, and its name (aleph = ox) has still survived in Hebrew and Greek (aleph or alpha). This process of the gradual change of a picture into a character is most clearly traceable in the various stages of Egyptian hieroglyphics, which, when written more cursively, assumed such different shapes (in hieratic and demotic respectively), that often there remains scarcely a like ness between different forms of the same characters. Among the ideographic methods there are some, however, which scarcely seem to deserve the name of writing, in the ordinary sense. Such are the Peruvian quippos, or knots, which, by changes in color, size, arrangement, and the rest, indicate a certain special sequence of ideas; further, the " khernus,' or sticks, which. before the introduction of their present alphabet, the Tartars used to circulate among their tribes, to indicate the number of men and horses to be used for some special expedition. Similar to the Peruvian quippos was (according to the celebrated Chinese work, also the primitive Chinese mode of writing; while the Scandinavian and Germanic runes rather remind of the Tartar staves. Of a more advanced stage appears the Mexican pichne-writing, a system by which single syllables or words were expressed by 'Monograms. The Chinese system appears to com bine both the ideographic and phonetic characters; but there is scarcely a doubt that even the phonetic signs are derived from ideographic ones. The step to the alphabetic system, however, was never taken by the Chinese.