Alphabet Key To History Of Mankind

Author(s): David Diringer
Publisher: Hutchinsons Scientific and Technical Publications

Page 554

THE LATIN ALPHABET
553 instead the Christian sign of the cross (still in use among illiterates) as the pledge of their good faith and witness to their consent and approval it was in the monasteries that the lamp of learning was kept alight. Education was in certain periods almost entirely monastic, or at least conducted by teachers trained in monastic institutions. The earliest scribes, for instance, in the British Isles were either Irish or foreign monks (mainly Italian), or educated under foreign monks. But there were also important centres of learning in the Cathedral schools.
In consequence, Latin (using naturally the Latin alphabet), the language of the Roman Church, became and remained for many centuries the international tongue of the European higher intellectual world, and it is still used extensively for learned works and the theological treatises in the Roman Catholic Church, although it lost its dominant position in consequence of the natural development of the last three or four centuries. However, the Latin alphabet, in all its varieties, had been given ample opportunities for its adoption by the great majority of the European peoples, and its adaptation to tongues belonging to most different linguistic groups.
On the other hand, in more recent times the main factor expressed by the motto "alphabet follows the religion" has gradually been replaced by "alphabet follows the flag" and "alphabet follows the trade."
"The adaptation of a script to a new language is not an easy matter, especially when the new language contains sounds which do not exist in the speech from which the alphabet had been borrowed. There arises therefore the difficulty of representing the new sounds. This difficulty has been solved, generally speaking, in different ways:
(1) By representing the new sounds by existing symbols for which there is no use in the new language; for instance, the Latin letter, which was redundant, because the letter k was accepted to represent the sound k in all circumstances, was introduced in some Slavonic languages (Polish, Czech, Croatian, and so forth) to represent the sound ts which in Germany and Central Europe is given to Latin c before e and i.
(2) Combinations of two or more letters were introduced to represent single sounds in the new languages. An interesting instance in this connection is the representation of the sounds sh and ch (as in church") in various languages; whereas the Cyrillic Russian alphabet has a single symbol for the combination sheh (as in Ashchurch), Czech, another Slavonic language, would use for it the combination , Polish, again a Slavonic speech, represents it by four consonants (30s), and German would need as many as seven consonants for the transliteration of this