Figure 12.1 The derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician. The early Greek alphabet varied in the direction of writing and in the forms of its letters, as shown. The pronunciation of Modern Greek is rather different from what is shown here.
The ninth letter, tt, started with another sound unknown in Greek, being one of the Semitic “emphatic” consonants, [t¿] (the superscript indicating pharyngealization, a tightening of the throat). Efforts to pronounce this sound proved useless. The closest thing in Greek was [th], an aspirated consonant, and so the letter became thta (only after the classical period did this letter come to be pronounced as a fricative, [θ]). The aspiration of the Greek consonant and the pharyngealization of the emphatic consonant were not in fact very similar, but both consonants were sounds rather like [t] but with an extra, more forceful aspect to their pronunciation. Whether the Greek arrived at [th] immediately, by means of a mispronunciation, or whether the usefulness of the letter for [th] only occurred to him later, as he found himself needing to write the phoneme, is impossible to say.
The tenth letter, yd, standing for the palatal semivowel [j] in Phoenician, was misunderstood immediately. Greek only used [j] as a reduced version of the vowel [i] in diphthongs. Greek words could not begin with [j], but they could begin with [i]. The Greek would have heard the letter’s name as [io:d] and pronounced it as [io:da], eventually to become ita. The fledgling Greek alphabet had just acquired another vowel from the consonantal Phoenician alphabet through simple misperception.
Kaf, lmed, mm, and nn were relatively straightforward to the Greek, and he learned them quickly, with some predictable mispronunciation of their names. Then things got quite confusing. The fifteenth, eighteenth, and twenty-first letters all seemed to begin with the same sound, [s]. In reality, they were smek, plain [s], sd, the emphatic [s¿], and šn, probably [∫]. For the time being, the Greek learned the three strange names and three arbitrary symbols, hoping it would all make sense when he got to the end of the list and his friend would show him how to actually use the symbols he was memorizing.
The sixteenth letter was every bit as bad. Its name was ‘ayin, which began with a very peculiar sound indeed. It was a voiced pharyngeal fricative, [¿], a sound which the Greek might have made as an expression of exasperation, but never as a phoneme in a word. The existence of this sound in Phoenician may well have convinced him that the language was far too hard for him to learn (as its modern counterpart is the bane of second-language learners struggling to pronounce Arabic). He might have tried to skip this one, but his friend was very particular about teaching him the entire list of names and symbols, as though there were something magical about reciting the complete list in the correct order. In trying to pronounce this letter, it was simplest to just leave off the initial throat-clearing sound, which left a back vowel [a] as the next sound, not too different from the [] which he eventually settled on as its value. The letter came to be called ou, and only became known as omicron (o μικρóv, or “little o”) in the second or third century AD.
The seventeenth letter, p, was easy and was easily translated into pei (πει, and eventually pi, π ι, many centuries later). The nineteenth letter, qf, started with a uvular [q]. Being made further back in the mouth than [k], this sound was not phonemic in Greek, but was not far from the pronunciation of the k phoneme when followed by a back vowel. Since the name qf contained a back vowel, the Greek was able to pronounce it to his friend’s satisfaction (his friend having by now become used to the Greek’s tendency to turn fricatives into plosives and to supplement word-final plosives with extra vowels). Never having heard of a phoneme, the Greek was not troubled by the fact that his kappa began with variants of the same phoneme.
The twentieth letter, rš, was not too difficult, though the Greek (ever obedient to the dictates of his native language) insisted on aspirating the r at the beginning of a word, turning it voiceless (and inspiring the much later Latin transcription of rho). The twenty-second and last letter, tw, was one of the easiest of all.
“Now do it yourself,” said the Phoenician. “And then practice over and over until you remember them perfectly. Then, when you really know all your letters, start using them to record words. Listen to yourself say a word, and then write down the letters whose names start with the sounds you hear.”
The Greek did as his friend suggested. Perhaps neither of them realized that a significant mutation had occurred in the transfer of the alphabet from one language to the other. In certain cases where the Phoenician had uttered consonant-initial names (in fact, all words in his language began with a consonant), his friend had heard vowel-initial names. Thus when the Greek began to write words, he had symbols for vowel phonemes as well as for (most of) his language’s consonants. This was fortunate: Greek, as an Indo-European language, could not be adequately written with only consonants. At the very least, it would have required extensive use of matres lectionis. However, using certain symbols that stood uniquely for vowels, and writing down all the vowels in a word, was a better solution for Greek (and later, for many other languages, including English).
My fanciful tale may diverge significantly from the actual events, but some aspects of it are likely to be true. I suspect that the voweled Greek alphabet – a new form of writing at the time – was to some extent an accident caused by misperception. The changes made from the Phoenician to the Greek alphabets were exactly those that a native speaker of Greek would make as mistakes. I also suspect that the Greek alphabet was created by an illiterate, not someone at home with written Phoenician. Creativity is rare in the history of writing, the more so among peoples with well-established literacy. Writing is so conservative in its influences that once one truly knows how to read and write it is virtually impossible to think of doing it any other way (Sejong having been a shining exception). Choe Mal-li was right: generally speaking, only uneducated barbarians have their own scripts. Fortunately, the Greeks at the time fit the description.
One significant addition to the 22 letters had to be made right away. Our anonymous first writer of Greek soon found that he needed a way to write the vowel [u]. Its sound was most like the sixth letter of the list he had learned, ww, but not exactly like it, as it was a vowel not a semivowel. He therefore turned his original ww symbol into two slightly different ones. He put the second one at the end of the alphabet and called it hu (, to be renamed upsilon, υΨιλóv or “plain u,” in Byzantine times).
Once the leap had been made from Phoenician to Greek, it was a much easier thing for the new script to spread from one Greek to another along trade routes. Over the eighth and seventh centuries the new alphabet spread throughout Greek lands, from the Ionian settlements in the east to Sicily and the lower boot of Italy in the west. In the absence of established literacy (or anything much to read), variation abounded, both in the shapes and stances of letters and in the direction of writing. Some people, especially in the earliest years, wrote from right to left as the original adapter (under the influence of his Phoenician friend) probably had. Others wrote from left to right or switched the direction of writing at the end of every line, thus writing back and forth boustrophedon, “as the ox plows.” By about 500 BC, left to right had settled out as the preferred direction.
There was local variation also in the number of letters the alphabet contained as different people tinkered with the technology in an attempt to fit the alphabet more precisely to their language. Although the Greek alphabet was the first in world history to record every vowel as well as every consonant, it was not the case that every Greek phoneme had a unique letter associated with it. In fact, the Greeks never achieved the ideal of a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and letters of the alphabet, neither at the alphabet’s creation nor at any other time in its history.
One inadequacy of the original version of the Greek alphabet was that it had no symbols for two of its three aspirated plosives, [ph] and [kh] (better known to modern readers by their post-classical pronunciations [f]
and [x]). On the islands of Crete and Thera this problem was solved by using two letters for one consonant: ΠH and KH. In other areas new letters were invented: ϕ and X in Athens, Corinth, and Ionia, but ϕ and Ψ in most of the rest of mainland Greece (see appendix, figure A.6).
In certain other cases, a sequence of two phonemes received a single letter. Due to the peculiarities of s (which behaves unusually in many languages), sequences of plosive + s could occur both at the beginnings and ends of words, making these sequences behave somewhat like single phonemes (most sequences of phonemes, by contrast, occur in reverse order at opposite ends of words, as in English strap vs. parts). So one of the extra s-symbols, , the one copied from Phoenician smek, was given the value [ks] in Ionia and Corinth, while in Athens this cluster was spelled XΣ, and in the parts of Greece that were using Ψ for [kh], it was spelled X (hence its later value in the Roman alphabet). Ionia used Ψ for [ps], for which other Greeks used either ΠΣ or ϕΣ.
Meanwhile, the other two s-symbols were giving some trouble. The original adapter had trouble telling them apart, and seems to have confused their names. Out of this confusion, most regions chose one symbol and one name. Thus some local alphabets used the eighteenth letter to stand for [s], writing it M (distinguished from M, mu) and calling it san, like the Phoenician name for the twenty-first letter (šn, later šin). Other alphabets dropped the eighteenth letter and retained instead the twenty-first letter. This became Σ (with four bars) or (with three) and was pronounced sigma, more reminiscent of Phoenician smek (number 15) than šn (number 21).
Another issue was the duplication of kappa and qoppa. The difference between the two was not phonemic, but in Greek (as in English, though rarely noticed by native speakers), a [k] before a back vowel was pronounced a little further back in the mouth than otherwise and was thus a little closer to Phoenician [q]. So K was used before A, E, and I, while was used before O and Y. The use of qoppa eventually died out except as an abbreviation for “Corinth” on coins and as the numeral 90. The Greeks used two systems of numerals, one based on abbreviations of number names and one based on the order of the alphabet. In the latter system, alpha was 1, bta 2, and so forth until ita was 10, kappa was 20, and so on. Obviously, a letter could not simply be removed from this system, so qoppa remained 90. The F (wau, later digamma) was also to become obsolete as the Greek dialects lost [w], but its use as the numeral 6 continued.
As with the sigma, many letters had variant shapes. The gamma used in Athens, Λ, would have been mistaken as a labda (later lambda) in Ionia or Corinth. The rho sometimes had a short tail, approximating later Latin R, but usually appeared as P. The u ([u], but fronted to [y] by classical times) could be written with or without a tail, as Y or V.
In Ionia, the local version of Greek had no [h]. The letter other Greeks referred to as hta was therefore pronounced ta. From there it was natural to start using H as a long vowel. E was then used only for the short vowel [ε], while H stood for its long counterpart [ε:]. Faced with the possibility of distinguishing long vowels from short ones, the Ionians made a further innovation. Opening the bottom of O, they made Ω, to be known centuries later (when the distinction in length was no longer made in everyday speech) as , omega (“big o”). They could now distinguish in writing between the short [] vowel and its long [] counterpart. However, neither the Ionians nor any other Greeks ever bothered to write the phonemic distinction between long and short [a], [i], or [u], using simply A, I, and Y.
The earliest uses of the alphabet were probably in trade, but the earliest preserved examples of Greek writing are snatches of poetry inscribed on ceramic vessels. Writing and versification served similar purposes: writing was a technology that artificially extended the memory, while hexameter poetry was used in the Greek oral tradition to render information memorable. The epics of Homer were the first lengthy works (that we know of) to be written down, sometime in the first century of the Greek alphabet. As a bard, Homer was a custodian of the Greeks’ accumulated wisdom and traditions. He delivered his tales in hexameters, and when they were given over to the artificial memory of letters they were recorded in hexameters.
Most things written in the early centuries of the alphabet are lost to us, having probably been written on leather, papyrus, or wood; but pottery is a great boon to archaeologists. While it breaks easily (requiring more to constantly be made), it never decomposes. Inscriptions scratched or painted onto ceramics are therefore of great help in tracing the early history of the alphabet. Broken potsherds (known as ostraca) served as notepads for everyday purposes, as well as for voting ballots in the fifth century BC Athenian unpopularity contest known as ostracism, in which the “winner” – generally a politician who was thought to be dangerous to democracy – was exiled from Athens for 10 years.
Despite the relative simplicity of the Greek alphabet, literacy never became the norm in ancient Greece. Learning to read and write requires time and application, even with a largely phonemic alphabet. More importantly, it requires motivation, which is in short supply in a culture where there is as yet little to read, very little to write on, and few jobs for which literacy is a prerequisite. Opportunity is also required, since learning to read requires a teacher. Without widespread motivation and opportunities, literacy rates remain low (as exemplified by Korea, where for all its simplicity han’gl, the “morning script,” made only modest inroads against illiteracy until the twentieth century). For important merchants and artisans it was a useful job skill; otherwise it was a luxury largely reserved for upper-class men. In all probability, women were almost uniformly illiterate, though with occasional high-born exceptions, of whom the most famous was the poet Sappho (writing roughly 610 to 580 BC).
Sappho’s lyric poetry (as opposed to the epic style) is one example of the wider range of uses to which writing began to be put around 600 BC. Another was the Greek vases of the sixth century, which often carry captions and labels, and sometimes the signature of the artist, such as that of the great potter and vase painter Exekias. Having writing on a vase seems to have enhanced its prestige value: some were adorned with letters in meaningless order. Obviously neither the artist nor the buyer of such a vase could read, but the writing was thought to look sophisticated. Meanwhile in Ionia philosophical thought was first committed to written form. More prosaically, writing began to be used for public purposes, in written laws and on coins.
The subsequent classical period (c. 480 to 323 BC) was characterized by a prodigious intellectual output over an astonishingly short period. Led by Athens, Greece in this short century and a half produced such luminaries as historians Herodotus and Thucydides, philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, while simultaneously creating works of sculpture and architecture that have never been surpassed.
Classical politics were unusual too, as this was the period of Athenian democracy (begun in 508 BC), in which every free adult male citizen had a voice. The technology of writing served the new political system admirably. Notices were posted for public display, the less important ones painted on wooden boards, but (luckily for posterity) the more important ones chiseled into stone – at least in Athens, which had plentiful quarries nearby. Literacy helped to preserve the new democracy, as citizens who knew how to read could better learn and defend their rights. Not coincidentally, the number of city-dwellers who could read grew significantly during the classical period. Even so, virtually all women, rural people, members of the lower classes, and slaves whose duties were not administrative remained illiterate.
Although Athens was the undisputed intellectual leader of the classical period, the seeds of Greek intellectual achievement were actually sown across the Aegean in Ionia. Here on the coast of Asia Minor the Greeks were in much closer contact with other civilizations. Refugees from the fall of the Neo-Assyrian Empire in 612 BC may have brought Mesopotamian learning to Ionia and contributed to intellectual cross-pollination there. The subsequent Ionian
Enlightenment of the sixth century featured the earliest scientific thinkers of the Western tradition, including Pythagoras, still remembered for his theorem about right triangles. Some of these natural philosophers committed their ideas to writing, creating the first Greek prose treatises.
The orthographic result of the Ionian Enlightenment is that the Ionic alphabet acquired a certain prestige in the eyes of other Greeks (who were by now vulnerable to intellectual prestige, being no longer barbarians). Ionian spellings tended to be used by fifth-century Athenian tragedians and writers of serious prose; then in late 403 or early 402 BC Athens officially adopted the Ionic alphabet as part of a series of reforms otherwise aimed at restoring democracy after a period of warfare and instability. The alphabetic reform entailed the adoption of Ω, omega, and the reassignment of H from hta to ta, so that two vowel phonemes gained symbols but the [h] ceased to be written at all. Simultaneously the Athenians gained the Ionian (xi) and ψ (psi), though the acquisition was not actually a step forward for the phonemic principle. Loss of subphonemic qoppa in favor of kappa, however, was. Other changes, such as inverting the labda, straightening the gamma, and adding a fourth bar to sigma, were changes in letter form but not in function.
In private use the new alphabet was not adopted instantaneously, but with time the Ionic alphabet prevailed in Athens and eventually in the entire Greek world. It is not surprising that the Athenians (and other Greeks) welcomed the chance to distinguish long mid vowels from short mid vowels, but it seems perverse to have done so at the price of actually losing a consonant letter. It is true that the Greek [h] was highly restricted in its use, occurring only at the start of morphemes; of all phonemes it was the one that would be least missed if left unwritten. Nevertheless, any Athenian who really wanted an optimally designed alphabet could have found a way to absorb Ionic long vowels without losing heta in the process. But innovation is rare in the history of the written word, and the force of literary prestige is strong.
The Writing Revolution Page 26
