Charles Davy’s *Conjectural Observations on the Origin and Progress of the Alphabetic Script* (1772) — The Public Domain Review

“Writing, in the earliest times of the world, was a delineation of the outlines of those things which men wished to remember, roughly engraved in shells or stones, or marked on the leaves or bark of trees,” begins Charles Davy’s 1772 book. Probable observations on the origin and process of alphabetical writing. From the starting blocks, Davy admits the futility of his task. Either writing has a divine origin, given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai, or there was a secular form of graphological origins that people will never recover. Rather than proposing a coherent theory of the alphabet’s origins, Davy offers (often contradictory) conjectures, beginning with the observation that—as evidenced by the shared forms and names of some letters—the Hebrew, Samaritan, Arabic, and Greek alphabets all evolved from a common ancestral script. He soon comes to the problem of phonological and graphemic correspondence. “The great difficulty of the invention consisted in… being so well acquainted with the powers and range of human utterances, that we were able to align a sufficient number of characters for all the variety of sounds we require in language.” Like Hermogenes in Plato Cratylus (and like structuralist thinkers influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure in the twentieth century), Davy resists the idea that there was ever any form of strict motivation or correspondence between the appearance, name and sound of letters. Hebrew, for example alephArabic alifGreek alphaand the Latin “A” all derive from a character once similar to and named after the ox, he writes. But to say that the “sound of the broad A, which is the voice of the animal” models the way in which all alphabetic letters coordinate their shape, sound, and name “seems a step beyond the unimpaired powers of the human mind.”