The Writing Revolution

by Amalia E Gnanadesikan

  In the Hellenistic period (reckoned from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to that of the last Hellenistic monarch, Cleopatra VII, in 30 BC), the Greek language spread beyond the borders of the Hellenes, as the Greeks called themselves, to all the lands which had once belonged to the Persians, and which Alexander had conquered. From Sicily to the borders of India, townspeople learned the Greek language and adopted Greek ways, while country people went about their old ways much as ever. Having produced much of the glitter of the classical age, it was Athens’ turn to enjoy prestige. The new international form of Greek, called Koine, was based largely on the Attic dialect of Athens (Attica being the area around Athens), though it was written in the Ionic alphabet, by then firmly associated with Athens. Modern Greek is descended from Koine.

  One of the new Greek-speaking cities was Alexandria, founded by Alexander in Egypt. In the chaos following Alexander’s death, one of his generals, Ptolemy, seized Egypt and got himself crowned pharaoh, founding a dynasty that was to last until Cleopatra’s suicide in 30 BC. At Alexandria Ptolemy endowed the Museion, a scholarly academy and library. The library was intended to include all of Greek literature. Texts from all over the Greek world were collected or copied onto papyrus scrolls and placed in the library. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, was also done at Alexandria. Although the library was eventually destroyed (unfortunately, the Greeks did not keep back-up copies on clay tablets!), we nevertheless owe to the Alexandrian scholars the preservation of texts such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, which were collected there and served as the basis for further copying.

  In the process of accumulating and copying texts, the Alexandrian scholars began to show concern for matters of orthography. They found that at certain points the lack of a written form of [h] made for ambiguity. They noted that the Greeks living in Italy had been more free-thinking than the Athenians. While they had gone along with the adoption of the Ionic alphabet, they continued to write [h] by cutting the hta in half and using . The Alexandrians adopted the Italian Greeks’ half H, but wrote it as a superscript on the following vowel, so that, for example, was ho. Loving symmetry, they made the other half of H stand for the lack of an [h] sound before a vowel: . These diacritics came to be termed “rough breathing” (for [h]) and “smooth breathing” (for lack of [h]). Their use was for many centuries largely reserved for cases where ambiguity could arise without them. These marks later became ‘and’, so that was ho and plain o.

  The Alexandrians were also the first to record the hitherto unwritten pitch-accent of Greek, as unprecedented numbers of non-native learners of Greek prompted a concern for clarity and avoidance of ambiguity. Pitch-accent was marked with an acute accent (e.g. ó) on high-pitched (i.e. accented) vowels, with a circumflex (ô) on long vowels whose first half only was high, or with a grave accent (ò). The grave accent was at first used for low-pitched (i.e. unaccented) vowels, and later for pitch-accents that occurred at the ends of words (in which position the high accent may have been pronounced somewhat lower than usual). As with “breathing,” however, pitch-accent was for centuries noted only where its absence might lead to ambiguity.

  Only by the ninth century AD (well into the Byzantine period, AD 330–1453) did the use of breathing and accent diacritics become fully regular, with all vowel-initial words marked for “rough” or “smooth” breathing and all words marked for accent. The inclusion of these diacritical marks went a long way toward making up for the fact that Greek did not yet mark word division in any way. Since breathing marks appeared only at the beginnings of words, and words had only one accent apiece, diacritics made individual words easier to find in the continuous text. Word spacing did not become a consistent feature of written Greek until the eighteenth century.

  The Byzantine concern for diacritics was prompted by changes in the spoken language. The [h], or “rough breathing,” had in fact disappeared from the spoken language centuries before, as had the system of pitch-accent, which was replaced by a stress-accent (similar to stress in English, in which one syllable per word is pronounced more forcefully than others). Pitch-accent and [h] belonged only to an archaic, literary form of the language. No longer preserved in the minds of native speakers, they had to be written down or lost.

  Such is the conservatism of written language that the breathing and accent diacritics continued to be used in written Greek until 1976. At that point, the breathings were abandoned and the acute, circumflex, and grave accents all became acute, marking the stressed syllable of a word. Modern Greek is thus unusually helpful in consistently marking for the reader the position of stress.

  Another invention of Byzantine times was the small letters, or minuscules. Ancient Greek was written entirely in what we now consider capital letters. All in all, ancient Greek inscriptions are rather difficult for modern readers, used as we are to visual cues such word spacing, punctuation, and capitalization.

  The development of minuscule letters was the endpoint in a long line of evolution in the shapes of the letters. Some modifications occurred as the alphabet was borrowed from the Phoenicians, remembered imperfectly, and disseminated around the Greek world. Then, over the course of the classical age, as the Greek alphabet began to be used for public display, the shapes of letters themselves became worthy of care and attention, attaining new balance and symmetry.

  By Hellenistic times, inscriptions were often carefully executed works of art. Meanwhile, however, more and more private writing was being done, and the effects of habitually writing with pen and ink on papyrus or parchment began to make themselves felt, even on inscriptions chiseled into stone. Serifs, probably derived from the little splash of ink that tended to be made at the ends of pen strokes, began to be incorporated into stone inscriptions. Meanwhile, some letters developed more rounded shapes: ∈, C, and ω were new forms of E, Σ, and Ω.

  Eventually a “book hand” distinct from inscriptional styles developed, with pervasive rounding of letter shapes, and eventually, by the ninth century AD, a complete minuscule alphabet which incorporated not only rounded letters but variations in the height of letters and their placement with respect to the line of writing, with descenders plunging below the line and ascenders sticking up above the rest of the text. Given the separate existence of capitals in inscriptions, there were now in effect two separate alphabets. Within a book, capitals were used for titles or marginal comments, but the capitalization of sentences and of proper names within a text did not occur until modern times, after a number of experiments in combining the two letter types.

  The Greek alphabet has often been praised for achieving a way of fully recording a language (both vowels and consonants – though not, for centuries, pitch-accent) with a minimum number of symbols. Yet it seems as though a script with a small number of symbols is not after all so desirable: the Greek alphabet and its living descendants, Roman, Cyrillic, and Armenian, are unique in the world for their duplication of letters into capitals and minuscules. (Other short alphabets, such as Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, increase their repertoire by using different letter shapes depending on a letter’s position in the word.) The Greek total of 24 letters was in the long run not enough; 48 was better, and 49 better still (minuscule sigma has two different forms: normally σ, but word-finally ζ). Furthermore, a number of additional symbols were used in manuscripts: special abbreviations and ligatures abounded. Ligatures and abbreviations ease the job of the writer (a significant one in the days before printing), while minuscules combined with a consistent capitalization scheme ease the job of the reader. By contrast, having a particularly short list of alphabetical symbols eases only the job of the learner, a concern felt only temporarily by each generation. It was only when Western Europe began to show renewed interest in learning (and then printing) Greek in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries that the profusion of special symbols abated to meet the needs of non-native speakers and the rigidity of type.

  As Western Europeans began to learn Greek for the first
time since the fall of Rome a millennium earlier, they were puzzled to find that although there were only five Greek vowel sounds ([a], [e], [i], [o], [u]), there were a great many vowel spellings. The spellings ι, η, υ, ει, ι, and υι were all pronounced [i] (as they still are today – it is only slight hyperbole to say that all Greek vowels are pronounced [i]). The difference in length between o and ω had been lost (both now being [o]), and ε and αι were both pronounced [e]. Had these letters always been read this way? The Greeks themselves thought they had, not realizing how much their language had changed over the centuries, and being used to their language’s arcane spellings. However, if the modern Greek pronunciation was the same as that used in classical times, then the ancients were very stupid indeed: they believed that a sheep says “vi vi,” the modern pronunciation of . (Greek consonants have also undergone pronunciation changes; bta is now pronounced [v].) The spelling of Modern Greek vowels is one of the many triumphs of conservatism in the history of writing, having strayed very far from a one-to-one alignment of phonemes and letters in favor of historical spellings.

  When the Greeks first developed their alphabet, they were barbarians; but so were all the other inhabitants of Europe. As the first people in post-Bronze-Age Europe to adopt writing and civilization, the Greeks enjoyed the cultural scope to develop both of these as they saw fit. Once they did, they held a monopoly; the other peoples of Europe could only follow their lead.

  The first people to copy the Greek alphabet were the Etruscans. The Etruscans lived in what is today still known as Tuscany in Italy. They spoke a unique, non-Indo-European language. To their south were the Latins, whose settlements included a small, as yet unremarkable town called Rome. Further south were the newly established Greek colonies.

  The Etruscans of the eighth century BC were on the way up, rapidly acquiring power and adopting urban civilization. They extended their influence both northward and southward through Latium, where they encountered the Greeks.

  The Etruscans were much taken with Greek culture. They imported fine Greek ceramics, the Greek gods and their associated myths, and, around 700 BC, the early Greek alphabet. They seem to have had a great deal of respect for the alphabet. Indeed, it was a status symbol: they copied it out, exactly as they had learned it, and wrote it on important objects such as grave goods. Nevertheless, the alphabet as they had learned it did not actually fit their language. Etruscan had no voiced plosives, so they found they had no use for the letters bta or delta. Gamma came to represent a voiceless [k], adding to the confusion caused by kappa and qoppa. Kappa was used before alpha, gamma before epsilon and ita, and qoppa before upsilon (the omicron not being needed in Etruscan, due to a lack of [o]). Eventually kappa and qoppa were dispensed with (though kappa held on in the north). Also lost were xi and chi. Heta continued to be used for [h] and the digamma was used for [w]. Omega, the last addition to the Greek alphabet, was not in the original model alphabet that the Etruscans copied; they never missed it. There was no way to write [f] in Greek (ϕ being pronounced [ph] at the time), so the Etruscans first tried digamma-heta (FH), but later invented a new letter for the purpose, written (see figure 13.1).

  Having adopted the alphabet in its early stages when its direction of writing was still feeling Phoenician influence, the Etruscans wrote from right to left, and occasionally boustrophedon. Their first writing, like Greek, had no word division, but in the sixth century BC Etruscan writers began separating words with a dot or colon. They carried word division unusually far, at times putting the dots between individual syllables or other short sequences of letters.

  For a time the Etruscans were the dominant culture in non-Greek Italy; according to tradition, the city of Rome itself was ruled by Etruscan kings until the founding of the Roman Republic in 509 BC. Yet over the next centuries Etruria came to be dominated by Rome and eventually the Etruscan language died out. Etruscan works of literature were not preserved and the language is now poorly understood, attested primarily in inscriptions, most of which are short funerary texts. The only remaining relic of the books the Etruscans wrote on long strips of linen fabric is a single religious text containing a ritual calendar. The linen made its way to Egypt, was used to wrap a mummy, and thus survived to be discovered by a Croatian traveler in the nineteenth century. Etruscan inscriptions ceased in the first century BC, as the Etruscan people were absorbed into Roman society and learned Latin. The last record of Etruscan having been spoken is in AD 408, when priests offered to recite Etruscan prayers to help save the city of Rome from besieging Goths. Whether anyone was using the language as a mother tongue anymore is not clear.

  Before the Etruscan language died, its alphabet had spread to other people. The most enduring legacy of the Etruscan alphabet was the script of the Latin-speaking Romans, but other early peoples of Italy also borrowed the alphabet to write now-forgotten languages such as Venetic, Faliscan, Oscan, and Umbrian.

  In the first centuries AD Greek became the language of Christianity in the eastern part of the Roman Empire (which became the Byzantine Empire with the division of the Roman Empire into western and eastern sections in AD 330). From being an exporter of pagan religion and myths, Greece became a center of Christianity. The Coptic alphabet was one result, created in the first centuries of the Christian era with the addition of a few symbols from the native Egyptian demotic script.

  The conversion of the barbarians of Europe inspired the creation of new alphabets based on Greek. In the fourth century AD the Gothic bishop Wulfila designed a Greek-inspired alphabet so as to be able to translate the Bible into his native language (see figure 12.2). Gothic, the sole member of the East Germanic branch of the Germanic languages, eventually became extinct, and Wulfila’s alphabet died with it. All that remains is a handful of manuscripts, including parts of Wulfila’s translation of the Bible.

  The Goths were converted to Christianity, largely through the efforts of Bishop Wulfila. Unfortunately, according to the majority view Wulfila was a heretic: the Christianity which the Goths learned from him was Arian Christianity. Arianism, which taught a more limited version of the divinity of Christ than orthodox Christianity, was popular in the eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire in Wulfila’s time but was soon afterward defeated within the borders of the empire. The continued Arianism of the Goths helped to set them at odds with the Roman Empire and they seemed to have no compunctions about sacking Rome in 410. Orthodox Christians in both halves of the empire took note of this, and it was to be centuries before anyone else in Europe attempted to translate the Bible into a barbarian vernacular, where it might be misunderstood and misinterpreted (though safely off to the east, in Armenia and Georgia, new alphabets based loosely on Greek were created in the fifth century to make Christian texts accessible in the local languages).

  Eventually memory of the Goths faded. In 862 the Byzantine emperor received a request from a Slavic prince, Rastislav of Morava (a land encompassing present-day Slovakia, Moravia, and parts of Austria and Hungary). Rastislav and his people had become Christians, he said. Could the emperor send them someone to instruct them in the faith? The emperor turned to the monk (later saint) Cyril, a man known for his facility with languages. Cyril heard the emperor with misgivings. If he tried to teach an illiterate people, how quickly would his words get mutated by the oral tradition, laying the Slavs open to heresy, and himself to accusations thereof? He would go, he said, only if he could set down what he was teaching in an alphabet. Permission was granted.

  Since neither the Slavs nor the Byzantines were particularly interested in the Slavs becoming Hellenized, Cyril was free to adapt alphabetic writing as much as he chose so as fit the phonemes of the Slavonic language – a goal the more desirable if the result was to be read by priests, who would not, in the early years of Slavic Christianity, have been native Slavonic speakers. The irony is that the alphabet Cyril designed was probably not the one that we now call Cyrillic. Rather it was a script called Glagolitic that he brought to Prince Rastislav in 863. Cyr
il translated various liturgical works into the Slavonic vernacular. His brother, St. Methodius, accompanied him and continued mission work in Morava after Cyril’s death in 869. Methodius was credited by later tradition with having translated the Bible into Slavonic; but if it ever existed, Methodius’s Bible has not survived, and the Slavonic Bible that eventually emerged was due to later translation efforts.

  After Methodius’s death in 884, his disciples were persecuted and scattered, some of them ending up in Bulgaria. Here they helped to inspire a tradition of Bulgarian learning and literacy. As Bulgaria developed, it looked to civilized Byzantium as the source of learning and faith. It was probably here, in the last years of the ninth century, that the Slavonic alphabet was revised so as to look more Greek, yielding the script now known as Cyrillic (figure 12.2).

  Cyrillic became the official script of the Slavonic Orthodox Church. Glagolitic was increasingly marginalized, except in Croatia where the population was Roman Catholic. The use of Glagolitic finally petered out in the nineteenth century. Modern Croatian uses the Roman alphabet, while Serbian (linguistically speaking a dialect of the same language, Serbo-Croatian) uses Cyrillic.

  Figure 12.2 Two of the descendants of the Greek alphabet, Gothic and Cyrillic. Cyrillic has added letters to the end of the alphabet so as to adapt to the Slavic languages. The Gothic alphabet predates the development of minuscules, so the Gothic letters have only one form each. Cyrillic uses minuscules, but they are less different from the capitals than those of the Greek or Roman alphabet.