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

“Writing, in the earliest ages of the world, was a delineation of the outlines of those things men wanted to remember, rudely graven either upon shells or stones, or marked upon the leaves or bark of trees”, begins Charles Davy’s 1772 Conjectural Observations on the Origin and Process of Alphabetic Writing. From the starting blocks, Davy admits the futility of his task. Either writing has divine origins, gifted to Moses on Mount Sinai by God, or there was a secular form of graphological genesis that humans will never recover. Instead of proposing a coherent theory about the alphabet’s origins, Davy offers (often contradictory) conjectures, beginning with the observation that — evidenced by the shared shapes and names of some letters — the Hebrew, Samaritan, Arabic, and Greek alphabets all sprung from a common ancestral script. He soon arrives on the problem of phonological and graphemic correspondence. “The great difficulty of the Invention consisted in . . . being so well acquainted with the powers and extent of human utterance, as to be able to align a sufficient number of characters for all the variety of sounds we want in Language.” Like Hermogenes in Plato’s Cratylus (and like structuralist thinkers influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure in the twentieth century), Davy resists the idea that there was ever any kind of strict motivation or correspondence between the appearance, name, and sound of letters. For instance, the Hebrew aleph, Arabic alif, Greek alpha, and Latin “A” all stem from a character that once resembled and was named for the ox, he writes. But to say that the “sound of the broad A, which is the voice of the animal” is a model for how all alphabetic letters align their shape, sound, and name “seems a stretch beyond the unafflicted powers of human wit.”