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    2015 283471 The-Loom

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    OFNS Music

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    THE LOOM OF LANGUAGE A Guide to Foreign Languages for the Home Student by FREDERICK BODMER edited and arranged by LANCELOT HOGBEN London GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD FIRST PUBLISHED IN JANUARY 1944 SECOND IMPRESSION FEBRUARY, 1944 ‘THIRD IMPRESSION APRIL 1945 FOURTH IMPRESSION MAY 1946 FIFTH IMPRESSION 1949 ' DULOGICAL rnavvraxbrory SEX%aeok8 é + ac are made up of three consonants separated by two intervening vowels, and the three consonants in a particular order are characteristic of a particular root, This means that if cordite (ko:dait) were a Hebrew word, all possible combinations which we can make by putting dif. ‘ferent yowels between & and d or d and ¢ would haye something to do. with the explosive denoted by the usual spelling, This unique regu. The Story of the Alphabet 71 larity of word-pattern led the old Rabbinical scholars to speak of the consonants as the body and the vowel as the soul of the word. In so far as we can recognize bodies without theological assistance the metaphor is appropriate. Consonants are in fact the most tangible part of the written word. A comparison of the next two lines in which the same sentence is written, first without consonants, and then without vowels, - is instructive from this point of view: 1.6 A.C .U. .0.€ ea.y .0 ca, Then turn the page upside down and read this: pod 2 tet cam gpm ocr sy If you carry out experiments of this kind you will discover two things. One is that it is easy to read a passage without vowels in English if there is something to show where the vowels should be, as in the above. The other is that it is much less easy to do so if there is nothing to show where the vowels ought to come. Thus it would be difficult to interprets ths © mch mrs t rd Owing to the build-up of Semitic root-words, we have no need of dots to give us this information. Once we know the consonants, we hold the key to their meaning. Any syllabary based on twenty-odd open monosyllables with a different consonant would therefore meet all the needs of a script capable of representing the typical root-words of a Semitic language. The Semitic trading peoples of the Mediterranean took twenty-two syllable signs from Egyptian priestly writing, as the Japanese took over the Chinese monosyllabic logograms. They used them to represent the sounds for which they stood, instead of to repre- sent what the sounds stood for in the parent language. Because they did not need to bother about the vowels, they used twenty-one of the Egyptian symbols to represent. the consonant sounds of the root, without paying attention to the vowel originally attached. Thus the alphabet began as an alphabet of consonants (Fig. 15). Such an alphabet, or B-C-D, was only workable in the hands of the Semitic peoples. If we had no English vowel symbols, the succession of consonants represented by mich could stand for milch (in milch cow), or for the Bible name Moloch. Similarly ost could stand for vesé or visit, and pts could stand for pities or Patsy. This was the dilemma. of the Atyan-speaking. colonizers and. traders of tsland: Greece. who came into contact ‘with the syllable writing of Cyprus (Figs. 13 and 14) and 72 The Loom of Language the consonant writing of the Phoenicians They used a language which was extremely rich in consonant combinations. The Greek word for man is avOpwros, from which we get philanthropy and anthropology. If you write the consonants only in phonetic script (p. 83), this is nérps. There is nothing in the word-pattern of the Greek language to - exclude all the possible arrangements which we can make by filling Fein GT GEER A A PD 77

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