Ouipus.—We must include in this form of writing the plan pursued by the ancient Peruvians in their quipus. These were series of knotted cords, varying in size, length, color, and thickness. Each of these pecu liarities, as well as the forms of the knots, had a recognized signification, so that, the general sense of the whole being known, the details could be ascertained from the quipu itself. Not only were the accounts of the kingdom, the reports of the taxes, and the number of fighting-men thus kept with accuracy, but also the past history of the nation, the verses of songs and dramas, and the myths of their religion. Although nowhere else developed to such a system, a similar method of recording ideas was observed among some of the natives of Siberia; and the frequent habit with some among ourselves of tying a knot in the handkerchief to recall an idea or fact to mind is a familiar proof of how naturally it would sug gest itself for the purpose (see pi. 53, fig. 12).
B. Sound-IT'rifing-.—The progression from thought- to sound-writing was a gradual one, and was greatly favored by the phonetic constitution of certain languages. It came about, in the first place, by the simple method of the rebus, still familiar as a puzzle among the games of chil dren, and by the presence in a tongue of a number of homophonous words e. those having the same or nearly the same sound, but with different meanings.
The difference between the rebus and picture-writing is that the former refers to the sound and the latter to the idea. Thus in picture-writing the concept " pencil " could be conveyed by the actual picture of that object, or symbolically by a V-shaped mark, representing its sharpened point ; while by the rebus we should have the figure or symbol of a pen and that of a sill, these two, in sound, forming pencil, although any other relation between a door- or window-sill and a pencil is as remote as possible.
This method was common in the heraldry of the Middle Ages, and was that most familiar to the Aztecs. The English family of Bolton carried as their arms the device of a crossbow shaft, a bolt, driven through a cask, a tun. The complex figure by which the name of the emperor Monte zuma is represented in the Aztec codices is composed of a part of a trap, the head of an eagle, a lancet, and a band. In the Nahuatl language the words corresponding to these (their terminations omitted) are mo, which closely approximated the Nahuatl pronunciation of the name. The old hieroglyphic script of Egypt, which was just emerging from the condition of picture-writing, displays, especially in some of the cartouches recording proper names, a utilization of the same simple device.
Let us proceed a step forward, and suppose that such a method of writing the two sounds " pen-cil " had become general. Soon it would be noticed that the figure for the sound fen represented as many mean ings as that sound had in the spoken language—in English not onlyelz, an instrument used for writing, but pen, a small enclosure for beasts, and, dialectically, a headland. All these would, for the sake of simplicity, be grouped under the same symbolic figure. Where such homophones were very numerous, as is the case in monosyllabic languages like the Chinese, in which the same syllable may have a score of totally diverse meanings, some sign would be added to designate which was intended. This is secured in the script of that tongue by what are called deierminath)es, accessory signs indicating to what class of objects the main sign refers.
Chinese and Japanese genius of the Mongolian tongues did not favor a further differentiation of their phonetic elements. Those idioms are largely monosyllabic and isolating, and they distinguish the different meanings of a monosyllable by pronouncing it with a rising, a falling, an intermediate, or a varied inflection of the voice not capable of reproduction in an alphabetic notation. Hence they never developed an alphabet, and do not find it convenient to employ any that have been proposed. They still- content themselves with their unwieldy apparatus of nearly eighty thousand characters (including the combinations), though it requires a lifetime to learn the half of them.
When in the third century of our era the Japanese became acquainted with the Chinese system of writing, the influence upon it of their poly syllabic and more or less inflected language soon became evident. Al though they retained a certain number of its ideograms, they analyzed most of its complications down to a limited number of syllables. As every syllable in Japanese must be " open "—that is, must begin with a consonant and end with a vowel—their number was limited, especially as the old Japanese had hut ten consonants and five vowels. Omitting cer tain combinations which do not occur in the spoken language, it is found that the seventy-two syllabic signs which constitute the modern Japanese alphabet render the language in an entirely satisfactory manner.