Okay, here it is Thursday evening, our last night in Charlotte.  Tomorrow at the crack of midmorning we'll set off for home.  I'm already looking forward to driving through West Virginia, but it's always poignant when you've made new friends as well as reestablished contact with older ones and then have to leave.  June and I have been doing quite a bit of that lately, it seems.  

Well, I'm not sure if it works this way, but since we didn't have precise and measurable objectives for our few days here in Charlotte, we've definitely met our goals. Seriously, "things" worked out well.  Had some time with some old friends and made some new ones.  The presentation at Community Fellowship Church was a fairly late add-in to an otherwise totally open schedule, and I not only really enjoyed doing it per se, but it also opened the door to some new relationships.

Tuesday morning, after my meeting with Allan D., a young evangelical scholar of mythology with a very bright future, June and I had lunch with Kathy V., and then she took us to the Museum of the Alphabet, a museum that displays the development of writing and various families of alphabets and their relationships.  I'll come back to that later.  Yesterday, after Norm G. told us that there is an easy back roads way to get to Wingate College from here we zipped down there and had lunch with Jimm W., who comments on this blog frequently, and whose corrections are always welcome.  We had dinner with Melissa and Devin P., an amazing couple, devoted to the Lord, coming out of some truly rough times.  (This dinner was also special since we went to a very nice Indian restaurant, and it was the first time in over two weeks that I had any food connected to South Asia; that's a long time to go without.)  

Today was kind of, sort of, more or less a day of packing and getting ready to head home. Well, June packed; I had some other little projects to finish, and I built a very simple pallet on which to place the suitcases in the back of the Dakota.  The tarp works fine, but the other day in Greensboro we sat in a downpour, and enough water collected in the truck bed to get the bottoms of the suitcases wet. The top sides were totally dry.  In only one out of three suitcases, the moisture seeped up and got some clothes damp. Since Norm is working on adding another room, I asked him for some scrap wood, of which he had plenty, and I was able to stick together enough of a pallet to take care of that minor problem.  We had both main meals with Norm and Barb, lunch at a BBQ place (which is like saying Babe Ruth was a baseball player), and dinner at a Chinese Buffet.  

So back to the Alphabet Museum.  This museum has been put up by Wycliffe/Jaars/SIL, I'm not sure who get how much of the credit, but it was the missionary board who focuses on Bible translation and their various preparatory and support groups. And they do deserve a lot of credit. I'm going to limit my comments to a display in the front lobby.

June took the pictures, and I highlighted whatever I considered to be interesting to share with you. I was fascinated by the entire museum, but the alphabet tree really captured my interest.

Remember now:  This is crucial.  The tree depicts the developments and dependencies of the various forms of writing, not of the languages. If I were to make a corresponding chart of the development of languages and their relationships to each other, it would look very different.  This tree is all about how people expressed their language in writing.  ...

[I fell asleep right around here last night, so it is now Friday evening already as I continue in a motel surrounded by beautiful mountains.]

... So on one single branch you may see  a representative of say, the Semitic language family along with one from the Indo-European family, or perhaps the Sino-Tibetan family, because those particular languages, even though entirely different from each other, used a similar form of writing. Conversely, you may see two closely related languages, such as modern European languages (German, Italian, French, and English) share the tree with Cherokee, an Iroquois language, because they use basically the same Roman alphabet

Furthermore, the exhibit is all about the alphabet.  So, pure pictographs, for instance, which are little sketches that people may make of objects and living beings could be considered "writing" if you stretch the term pretty widely, but are not really alphabets.  Alphabetic writing consists of symbols that in-and-of-themselves don't have much meaning, but, when put together, communicate a unit in the language (e.g. a word) without pictorially representing the object to which the word may refer.  E. g., the English word "house" is usually written with the Roman alphabet.  The letters by themselves are building blocks that could be used for many different words, e.g. "hose," or "sue." When put together as the word "house," the word does not look like a house, but it conveys the idea of a house to the mind of those who know the script and the language.  

In the picture on the left, you can see the big fat tree that represents most of the alphabets of the world and how they are related.  You also see a long trunk way on the right that is not connected; this is the highly complicated Chinese system of writing.  Then, at the bottom are four little clusters, representing "oddball languages," viz. those that seem to have had a totally independent origin.  In the central tree you see two large sets of branches diverging in the middle.  Right after the earliest Semitic types of writing, the Phoenicians made up a very popular alphabet; prior to it south-Semitic and old Hebrew may have diverged from the main branch, but the Phoenicians set the standard for most of  the rest of the world with their alphabet.  Subsequently it divided itself into two main branches (not counting the Punic script, which is a variation of Phoenician, as it was written in Carthage).  The other two main branches that arose out of Phoenician are the Early Greek and Aramaic forms of writing.  These two each constitute a watershed between the two sides of the tree.  The distinction is based on how much each alphabet emphasizes vowels, that is to say whether they get their own letters (the "Early Greek branch" or are usually only marks made alongside the consonants (the "Aramaic" branch).  Of course, anyone who knows, say, the


Devanagari script, knows that you can

 wind up with both.  

The next two pictures

are three out of the four little arrows on the bottom (Meso-American, Cretan, Hittite, and Indus Valley.  Those are the types of writings  that do not seem to be related to any other alphabets.  Two of these two writings are notorious for not yet being decipherable to modern people: Linear A (ancient Cretan) and the Indus Valley script, which is even more closed to us than Linear A.  For Linear A we have at least a smidgeon of an idea of what the original language may have been like.  But the language of the Indus Valley civilizations prior to the immigration of the Aryans (Mohenjodaro, Harappa, etc.) is as opaque to us as the writing.

Let me point to just a few items that I found interesting beside the side-by-side placement of various unrelated languages using related forms of writing.  I did not re-label everything because 1) some of the items may not have meant much to either me or you and 2) I didn't want the picture to get too cluttered.   I mentioned Cherokee above as one of the languages that uses the Roman alphabet, the one with which I am writing at the moment.  You may not have thought of any Native American language actually having an alphabet.  Well, in the 1820's there was a Cherokee man named Sequoia, who would have been considerate illiterate insofar he could neither read nor write English.  But he wanted his tribe to be able to read and write just as the white people do, so, along with his daughters, he created a writing system for the Cherokee language, using the Roman alphabet along with a few other symbols.

You may have a hard time figuring out whether Korean writing has its origin in Chinese script or in North Indian script.  The answer is, in fact, both.  A nineteenth-century Korean king invented a totally rational way of writing, using Chinese characters as a basis for a genuine alphabet governed by North Indian rules.

Returning to the Roman alphabet, the genealogy for our English system of writing then looks like this: the hypothetical proto-Semitic, a very general North Semitic. Phoenician, Early Greek, Etruscan, ancient Roman (the script for classical Latin), medieval Roman (addition of "J," and "W" to writing Latin) and modern "Roman," which will have some wrinkles such as Umlauts or accents for writing in particular languages.  

Needless to say, I was interested in the placement of the Indic scripts on the tree.  On the display, the pathway is pretty straightforward 1) from Aramaic 2) to an intermediate language-and-writing system called Brahmi 3) to Southern and Northern Indian scripts.  I have to admit that I found the transitions between Aramaic and Brahmi as well as the one between Brahmi and the modern versions of Indic scripts not totally convincing. I suspect the reason for my failure to do so is that I'm not used to looking at writing at that level and expect more than I should expect, while simultaneously lacking the eye of the professional who can make out similarities or trends where other people can't.  Then again, maybe it is weak.  The scripts used for Telugu or Tamil are examples of the Southern variety, whereas Devanagari, the script Sanskrit and Hindi belongs to the North.  It is related to Tibetan.

Wow! It's getting to be midnight again already.  Gotta get some sleep for tomorrow's driving and reunion with Poly (our cat).