The origin and progress of the art of writing : a connected narrative of the development of the art, its primeval phases in Egypt, China, Mexico, etc; its middle state in the cuneatic systems of Nineveh and Persepolis, to its introduction to Europe through the medium of the Hebrew, Phœnician, and Greek systems, and its subsequent progress to the present day / by Henry Noel Humphreys. Illustrated by a number of specimens of the writing of all ages, and a series of facsimiles from autograph letters from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century.

  • Humphreys, Henry Noel, 1810-1879
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The origin and progress of the art of writing : a connected narrative of the development of the art, its primeval phases in Egypt, China, Mexico, etc; its middle state in the cuneatic systems of Nineveh and Persepolis, to its introduction to Europe through the medium of the Hebrew, Phœnician, and Greek systems, and its subsequent progress to the present day / by Henry Noel Humphreys. Illustrated by a number of specimens of the writing of all ages, and a series of facsimiles from autograph letters from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    JAPANESE WRITING, TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES. Sir,—The Japanese method of writing is not entirely 1 ideographic, for besides that system, which is represented by Chinese characters, either in the square or cursive form, ■ the Japanese have a phonetic one,which is always in modern books used in connexion with the other. It is syllabic, re- sembling in this respect the Sanscrit and the Ethiopic, and has a syllabarium of 47 sounds, called from the first three Iroha. It appears under two modifications, both of which I have been in use since the ninth century—i.e., first, the Hiragana, which is the more cursive form, with several hundred characters, each of the 47 syllables having a num- f ber of variations (though frequently only slight) in shape. f This sort is used with the cursive Chinese. Secondly, the 1; Katakana, which contains only one character for each of the j 47 syllables, and is employed with the square Chinese, j. The above statements can be verified by reference to ? Aston’s “ Grammar of the Japanese Written Language,” or t Hofitmann’s “Japanese Grammar,” second edition. ; The intermixture of the ideographic and phonetic ele- i ments in Japanese produces, therefore, a complicated and ^ difiScult system of writing, having some analogy with that of the Assyrian cuneiform and the ancient Egyptian. ‘ I am. Sir, your obedient servant, June 6. Y-BEN-A. r-]kT/FT37»t) TkT A W '