The art of expressing sounds by written signs was of later origin than the art of measurement.

The Italians did not any more than the Hellenes develop such an art of themselves, although we may discover attempts at such a development in the Italian numeral signs,( 10) and possibly also in the primitive Italian custom--formed independently of Hellenic influence--of drawing lots by means of wooden tablets.

The difficulty which must have attended the first individualizing of sounds--occurring as they do in so great a variety of combinations--is best demonstrated by the fact that a single alphabet propagated from people to people and from generation to generation has sufficed, and still suffices, for the whole of Aramaic, Indian, Graeco-Roman, and modern civilization; and this most important product of the human intellect was the joint creation of the Aramaeans and the Indo-Germans.

The Semitic family of languages, in which the vowel has a subordinate character and never can begin a word, facilitates on that very account the individualizing of the consonants; and it was among the Semites accordingly that the first alphabet--in which the vowels were still wanting--was invented.

It was the Indians and Greeks who first independently of each other and by very divergent methods created, out of the Aramaean consonantal writing brought to them by commerce, a complete alphabet by the addition of the vowels--which was effected by the application of four letters, which the Greeks did not use as consonantal signs, for the four vowels -a -e -i -o, and by the formation of a new sign for -u -- in other words by the introduction of the syllable into writing instead of the mere consonant, or, as Palamedes says in Euripides, -- Ta teis ge leitheis pharmak orthosas monos Aphona kai phonounta, sullabas te theis, Ezeupon anthropoisi grammat eidenai .-- This Aramaeo-Hellenic alphabet was accordingly brought to the Italians through the medium, doubtless, of the Italian Hellenes; not, however, through the agricultural colonies of Magna Graecia, but through the merchants possibly of Cumae or Tarentum, by whom it would be brought in the first instance to the very ancient emporia of international traffic in Latium and Etruria--to Rome and Caere.
The alphabet received by the Italians was by no means the oldest Hellenic one; it had already experienced several modifications, particularly the addition of the three letters -- "id:xi", -- "id:phi", -- "id:chi" and the alteration of the signs for -- "id:iota", -- "id:gamma", -- "id:lambda".( 11) We have already observed( 12) that the Etruscan and Latin alphabets were not derived the one from the other, but both directly from the Greek; in fact the Greek alphabet came to Etruria in a form materially different from that which reached Latium.