Excerpt from A History of the Art of Writing Every one who has read a printed page of English, or any European writing, doubtless has wondered how the letters or words that he reads - or uses in writing to record his own thoughts - ever came to be used as the representations or symbols of spoken words. Our processes of thought in the ever-widening environment of these busy, modern days have become so automatic that we are apt to lose sight of the historical evidences of the long, constructive past written large over the pages of the voluminous present. That there is a whole volume of human history back of every one of the twenty-six alphabetic characters with which we write our thoughts may be a new idea to most readers of this book. Yet one will find as he investigates the subject that these simple symbols, apparently so arbitrary and meaningless to our latter-day eyes, are replete with the linguistic, even the domestic, history of countless generations of our remote ancestors. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.