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Authorship of the Alphabetic System and Date
In the alphabetic system the signs or letters are used, not as in the old picture-writing pictorially or ideographically for picturing ideas or "syllabically" in its usual sense, but as mere tokens or counters to express the sound of each of the few elemental vowel and consonantal sounds which are all that are necessary to spell out any word or sentence.
The Sumerians from the earliest-known period, as we have found, employed in their "syllabic" writing those particular signs with their "alphabetic" values generally, which are now disclosed to be the parents of our alphabetic letters, that is to say, they used the simple vowel signs to represent the vowel sounds, and the simple consonantal "syllables" of one consonant, followed by a vowel necessary to sound it, to represent the consonantal sounds, as regards those particular signs. But they did not often spell out words by such simple "alphabetic" signs, but mixed these up with a greatly preponderating number of syllabic signs, often containing two or more consonants.
Yet, sometimes the Early Sumerians appear to have spelt out a few of their words alphabetically even in the earliest period. In the opening line of the oldest-known historical Sumerian inscription engraved upon the famous votive stone-bowl of the Priest-king Udug of the fourth millennium B.C., the name of his great-grandfather, the
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