S being the
sibilant or hissing letter, and the serpent the hissing animal. This
view, I fancy (though I am not sure), has escaped the philologists, but
of course you know that all letters were originally _pictures of
things,_ and of what was S a picture, if not of the serpent? I
therefore assumed, by way of trial, that the snakes in the diagram
stood for a sibilant letter, that is, either C or S. And thence,
supposing this to be the case, I deduced: firstly, that all the other
figures stood for letters; and secondly, that they all appeared in the
form of pictures of the things of which those letters were originally
meant to be pictures. Thus the letter "m," one of the four "_liquid_"
consonants, is, as we now write it, only a shortened form of a waved
line; and as a waved line it was originally written, and was the
character by which _a stream of running water_ was represented in
writing; indeed it only owes its name to the fact that when the lips
are pressed together, and "m" uttered by a continuous effort, a certain
resemblance to the murmur of running water is produced. The longer
waved line in the diagram I therefore took to represent "m"; and it at
once followed that the shorter meant "n," for no two letters of the
commoner European alphabets differ only in length (as distinct from
shape) except "m" and "n", and "w" and "v"; indeed, just as the French
call "w" "double-ve," so very properly might "m" be called "double-en."
But, in this case, the longer not being "w," the shorter could not be
"v": it was therefore "n." And now there only remained the heart and
the triangle. I was unable to think of any letter that could ever have
been intended for the picture of a heart, but the triangle I knew to be
the letter #A.# This was originally written without the cross-bar from
prop to prop, and the two feet at the bottom of the props were not
separated as now, but joined; so that the letter formed a true
triangle. It was meant by the primitive man to be a picture of his
primitive house, this house being, of course, hut-shaped, and
consisting of a conical roof without walls. I had thus, with the
exception of the heart, disentangled the whole, which then (leaving a
space for the heart) read as follows:

{ ss
'mn { anan ... san.'
{ cc

But 'c' before 'a' being never a sibilant (except in some few so-called
'Romance' languages), but a guttural, it was for the moment discarded;
also as no word begins with the