These Phœnician letters, born on the walls of Egyptian tombs older than Abraham, and selected by Phœnician traders who took their boats up to Memphis at or before Joseph’s time, are the parents of all the alphabets now used in the world, with the exception of that one which the Japanese have taken from Chinese picture-writing. The Phœnicians carried their alphabet about with them to all the countries where they planted trading settlements, and it was adopted by Greeks, and by the Latins from the Greeks, and then gradually modified to suit the languages of all the civilized peoples of east and west.[138] The Hebrew square letters are a form of divergence from the original type, and even the Sanskrit character in all its various styles can be traced back to the same source by experts who have studied the transformations through which it has passed in the course of ages. It is, of course, easy to understand that these ubiquitous little shapes which through so many centuries have had the task laid on them of spelling words in so many different languages must have undergone some variations in their values to suit the tongues that interpreted them.
The original family of twenty letters have not always kept together, or avoided the intrusion of new comers. Some of the languages they have had to express, being in an early
stage of development, have not wanted even so many as twenty letters, and have gradually allowed some of them to fall into disuse and be forgotten; an instance of this we find in the alphabet of the northern nations--the Gothic--which consisted only of sixteen _runes_--called by new names; they have been handed down either directly from the Greek, or from the Greek through the Roman alphabet, and furnished with mystic meanings and with names peculiar to themselves.
In languages where nicer distinctions of sound were called for than the original twenty Phœnician signs carried, a few fresh letters were added, but in no case has any quite new form been invented. The added letters have always been a modification of one of the older forms--either a letter cut in half, or one modified by an additional stroke or dot. In this way the Romans made _G_ out of _C_, by adding a stroke to one of its horns. _V_ and _U_, _I_ and _J_ were originally slightly different ways of writing one letter, which have been taken advantage of to express a new sound when the necessity for a greater number of sound-signs arose; _W_, as its very name shows, is only a doubled form of _V_. At first sight it seems a simple thing enough to invent a letter, but let us remember that such a thing as an arbitrarily invented letter does not exist anywhere. To create one out of nothing is a feat of which human ingenuity does not seem capable. Every single letter in use anywhere (we can hardly dwell on this thought too long) has descended in regular steps from the pictured object in whose name the sound it represents originally dwelt. Shape and sound were wedded together in early days by the first beginners of writing, and all the labour bestowed on them since has only been in the way of modification and adaptation to changed circumstances. No wonder that, when people believed a whole alphabet to have been invented straight off, they also thought that it took a god to do it. Thoth, the Great-and-great, with his emblems of justice and his recording pencil; Oannes, the Sea-monster, to whom all the wonders of the under-world lay open; Swift Hermes, with his cap of invisibility and his magic staff; One-eyed Odin, while his dearly purchased draught of wisdom-water was inspiring him still. No one indeed--as we see plainly enough now--but a hero like one of these, was equal to the task of inventing an alphabet.