Читать книгу Facts and fancies for the curious from the harvest-fields of literature - Charles C. Bombaugh - Страница 46

Table of Contents

“The Egyptian Origin of our Alphabet” was the subject of a paper read before the New York Academy of Sciences by Dr. Charles E. Moldeuke, the Egyptologist. Two large charts on the wall showed in forty parallel columns the evolution of the various letters of the alphabet from the Egyptian hieroglyph through the Phœnician, Hebrew, and Greek to the Latin forms.

The common opinion, said the lecturer, that the Phœnicians invented the alphabet, is entirely unfounded; they merely adopted twenty-two letters from the Egyptians in 600 B.C. and then spread them as their own alphabet through Greece and Italy. The letters we use now go back to Egypt before the time of Moses and have represented practically the sounds in the same order for six thousand years.