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Nevertheless they have rendered all coming generations one service of the greatest possible value. They gave us our alphabet.
不過，他們給后人留下了一筆極有價值的遺產-一他們創造了字母。
The Phoenicians had been familiar with the art of writing, invented by the Sumerians. But they regarded these pothooks as a clumsy waste of time. They were practical business men and could not spend hours engraving two or three letters. They set to work and invented a new system of writing which was greatly superior to the old one. They borrowed a few pictures from the Egyptians and they simplified a number of the wedge-shaped figures of the Sumerians. They sacrificed the pretty looks of the older system for the advantage of speed and they reduced the thousands of different images to a short and handy alphabet of twenty two letters.
腓尼基人當然熟悉蘇美爾人發明的楔形文字，不過他們覺得這些歪斜的筆劃既笨拙又浪費時間。他們是凡事講求實際的商人，不肯把大量的時間花在雕刻這些繁瑣的字母上。于是他們投入工作，發明了一種大大優于楔形文字的新文字體系。他們從埃及的象形文字中借來幾個圖案，并簡化了數個蘇美爾人的楔形文字，以犧牲舊有文字的優美外形為代價，追求書寫的速度和效率，終于，他們將數千個不同的文字圖案簡化成短小而方便的22個字母。
In due course of time, this alphabet travelled across the Aegean Sea and entered Greece. The Greeks added a few letters of their own and carried the improved system to Italy. The Romans modified the figures somewhat and in turn taught them to the wild barbarians of western Europe. Those wild barbarians were our own ancestors, and that is the reason why this book is written in characters that are of Phoenician origin and not in the hieroglyphics of the Egyptians or in the nail-script of the Sumerians.
后來，這些字母越過愛琴海傳入希臘。希臘人為其增添了幾個自己創造的字母，并將改進的字母系統帶到意大利。羅馬人對字母的外形稍加修改，又將它們教給西歐的野蠻部落。這些野蠻人即我們的祖先。這也是本書以起源于腓尼基人的字母文字而非以埃及象形文字或蘇美爾人的楔形文字來寫作的原因。
