Art
“So, my boy, as the information concerning the Babylonian period passed from generation to generation to the succeeding generations not only by means of what is called ‘verbal transmission,’ but still also by means of marks on durable materials, that is, as it would be expressed there, by means of ‘inscriptions’ consisting of conventional signs which then stood for definite ‘being-articulate-sounds’ or letters—then, when at the beginning of the contemporary civilization certain beings there began to decipher them ‘from-a-bit-here-and-a-bit-there’ and realized that they could not sound or pronounce many of these definite letters, they then invented what is called a ‘written compromise.’
“This mentioned written compromise was that instead of the signs or letters which they could not pronounce, although they understood the sense of this pronunciation, they decided to employ a slightly similar letter of their alphabet at the time, and in order that everybody should understand that it was not that letter but quite another, they always wrote by its side a letter of the ancient Romans, now existing but already meaningless, called in English ‘h’ and among the contemporary French ‘ahsh.’
“From then on, all the other of your favorites began doing the same; they added to each of these suspicious letters this Roman ‘inheritance.’
“When this written compromise was invented, they had about twenty-five of these suspicious ‘letters,’ but in the course of time, as their ableness to pronounce deteriorated with the increase of their wiseacring, the number of the letters they specially invented for such a ‘being-ableness’ diminished, and by the time the word artist was invented they had already only eight of these letters; and in front of this notorious ‘h,’ they wrote letters, partly ancient Greek and partly ancient Latin, which they indicated in the following way: ‘th,’ ‘ph,’ ‘gh,’ ‘ch,’ ‘sch,’ ‘kh,’ ‘dh,’ and ‘oh.’
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