A hornbook (horn-book) is a single-sided alphabet tablet, which served from medieval times as a primer for study, [1] and sometimes included vowel combinations, numerals or short verse. [2] The hornbook was in common use in England around 1450, [3] but may have originated more than a century earlier. [4] The term (hornbook) has been applied to different study materials in different fields but owes its origin to children's education, represented by a sheet of vellum or paper displaying the alphabet, religious verse, etc., protected with a translucent covering of horn (or mica) and attached to a frame provided with a handle. [5]
Horn books, battledore books and crisscross books were all tablets designed primarily to teach the alphabet to children [6] laid out as an abecedarium, the elementary method of teaching used from Antiquity to the Middle Ages where letters of the alphabet were taught by rote. [7] An illustration of a hornbook from 1326 appears in a richly illuminated vellum manuscript (Liber de Officiis Regum, by Walter de Wilemete) but the earliest recorded reference (to a "boke of horn") is in 1450. [8] Wooden hornbook primers were in common use by children from the mid-15th century to late 18th century, evolving in to battledore books (mid-18th to mid-19th century), crisscross books, finally displaced by cardboard ABC books in the 19th century. [1] [6]
Hornbooks consist of a lesson sheet illustrating the letters of the alphabet, mounted on a paddle of wood, bone, leather, silver, lead alloy [9] or stone and protected by a thin sheet of translucent horn, [n 1] or mica, [n 2] held in place by narrow brass strips (latten) tacked through the horn to the paddle to protect the lesson sheet. [10] The paddle often had a handle with a hole for a cord or ribbon suspended from the child's girdle at their waist. The lesson sheet, which was first of vellum and later of paper, were typically inscribed with a large cross, [n 3] followed by alphabet letters, [n 4] numbers and in later version, short verse. [13] Hornbooks displayed letters of the alphabet, a syllabary and prayers for novice readers. Andrew Tuer described a typical hornbook with a line separating the lower case and capital letters from the syllabary. This syllabarium or syllabary, likely added to the hornbook in 1596, [1] taught pronunciations of vowel and consonant combinations. [14]
These syllables are possible ancestors to the modern instructional practice of new readers working with onsets and rimes in word families. From the first hornbook, the alphabet format cemented the learning progression from syllables to words. The inscriptions appear either in block print (illustrated upper left), best suited for learning to read or hand-written (illustrated lower right), best suited for learning to write. [15]
The memory of "hornbooks" in modern culture has faded partly because of the extreme scarcity of original exemplars as they fell out of use. [n 5] Hornbooks were educational tools for children, but children had other uses for hornbooks, which contributed further to their dearth. [16] [17] By the time that antiquarians had realised their lack in the 19th century, it was too late; most had been destroyed. [18] Those few authentic hornbooks in existence today are preserved either because of their intrinsic value (their owners were rich and famous e.g. Queen Elizabeth I), or because they were mislaid by their owners, lost beneath floor-boards, behind panelling, lodged in thatched rafters, [1] [6] or more recently buried, in various states of preservation. [12] [13] The rarity of hornbooks increased their value in the 19th century, which when combined with gaps in knowledge, opened the doors to counterfeit. [19] [20] Even the name itself (hornbook) has been appropriated, becoming synonymous with child education (e.g. The Horn Book Magazine), as a benchmark for essential education (e.g. Hornbook (law)), or used as a pejorative term (e.g. poorly educated). Today, there are certainly many more "spurious" hornbooks in circulation than genuine but, in the absence of verified exemplars, skilled counterfeit can be hard to discount.
Images of hornbooks are variously preserved in the margins of old manuscripts, [21] as a prop in portraiture (illustrated above) or referred to in verse:
Even so the Hornbooke is the seede and graine
Of skill, by which we learning first obtained :
And though it be accounted small of many,
And haply bought for twopence or a penny.
Yet will the teaching somewhat costly be
Ere they attain unto the full degree
Of scholarship and art.
In United States law, a hornbook is a text that gives an overview of a particular area of law. A law hornbook is a type of treatise, usually one volume, which could be a briefer version of a longer, multi-volume treatise. Students in American law schools often use hornbooks as supplements to casebooks.
An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given language. Not all writing systems represent language in this way: a syllabary assigns symbols to spoken syllables, while logographies assign symbols to words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
Fingerspelling is the representation of the letters of a writing system, and sometimes numeral systems, using only the hands. These manual alphabets have often been used in deaf education and have subsequently been adopted as a distinct part of a number of sign languages. There are about forty manual alphabets around the world. Historically, manual alphabets have had a number of additional applications—including use as ciphers, as mnemonics and in silent religious settings.
Greek is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.
O, or o, is the fifteenth letter and the fourth vowel letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is o, plural oes.
V, or v, is the twenty-second letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is vee, plural vees.
The Vietnamese alphabet is the modern writing script for the Vietnamese language. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages originally developed by Francisco de Pina (1585–1625), a missionary from Portugal.
The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy as he was illiterate until its creation. He first experimented with logograms, but his system later developed into the syllabary. In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme; the 85 characters provide a suitable method for writing Cherokee. The letters resemble characters from other scripts, such as Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Glagolitic, however, these are not used to represent the same sounds.
Canadian syllabic writing, or simply syllabics, is a family of writing systems used in a number of indigenous Canadian languages of the Algonquian, Inuit, and (formerly) Athabaskan language families. These languages had no formal writing system previously. They are valued for their distinctiveness from the Latin script and for the ease with which literacy can be achieved. For instance, by the late 19th century the Cree had achieved what may have been one of the highest rates of literacy in the world. Syllabics are an abugida, where glyphs represent consonant–vowel pairs, determined by the rotation of the glyphs. They derive from the work of linguist and missionary James Evans.
The Phagspa, ʼPhags-pa or ḥPʻags-pa script is an alphabet designed by the Tibetan monk and State Preceptor Drogön Chögyal Phagpa (1235–1280) for Kublai Khan, the founder of the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) in China, as a unified script for the written languages within the Yuan. The actual use of this script was limited to about a hundred years during the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty, and it fell out of use with the advent of the Ming dynasty.
Andrew White Tuer (1838–1900) was a British publisher, writer and printer.
Babm is an international auxiliary language created by the Japanese philosopher Rikichi Okamoto, also known as Fuishiki Okamoto. Okamoto first introduced the language in his 1962 publication The Simplest Universal Auxiliary Language Babm. The language did not achieve widespread adoption, even within the constructed language community, and currently has no known speakers. The language uses the Latin script as a syllabary, and possesses no articles or auxiliary verbs. Each letter marks an entire syllable rather than a single phoneme. Babm adheres to a sound-based rule set, which Okamoto delineates in his book. He explains, "Nouns are coined from three consonants and one vowel, verbs from one or two vowels between two consonants at the beginning and at the end. Adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, numerals, and propositions have respectively their own peculiar form."
Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics is a writing system for several Algonquian languages that emerged during the nineteenth century and whose existence was first noted in 1880. It was originally used near the Great Lakes: Fox, Sac, and Kickapoo, in addition to Potawatomi. Use of the script was subsequently extended to the Siouan language Ho-Chunk. Use of the Great Lakes script has also been attributed to speakers of the Ottawa dialect of the Ojibwe language, but supporting evidence is weak.
The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was used for writing Mycenaean Greek until the Late Bronze Age collapse and Greek Dark Age. This article concentrates on the development of the alphabet before the modern codification of the standard Greek alphabet.
The New England Primer was the first reading primer designed for the American colonies. It became the most successful educational textbook published in 17th-century colonial United States and it became the foundation of most schooling before the 1790s.
Wadaad's writing, also known as Wadaad'sArabic, is the traditional Somali adaptation of written Arabic as well as the Arabic script as historically used to transcribe the Somali language. This script is a part of the global adaptation of the Arabic script to regional languages, and can be viewed as a specific instance of the African usage of Arabic, known as Ajami scripts. In many early uses, it referred to scholarly writing that used a mixture of Arabic and Somali, with the proportion of Somali vocabulary varying depending on the context. The Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula have a deeply intertwined history, one such example is that Somalis are among the first people in Africa to embrace Islam. This is a continuation of the long history of interchange between the peninsulas—Sabaic inscriptions exist in abundance in Northern Somalia alongside Christian graves. Sabaic is the precursor that developed in Ethiopia to the Ge'ez script family. In much the same way that Islam and Arabic entered the Horn of Africa, Christianity and Sabaic had shared similar roles previously. This is due to the shared Rea Sea milleu of the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. Alongside standard Arabic, Wadaad's writing was used by Somali religious men (Wadaado) to record xeer petitions and to write qasidas. It was also used by merchants for business purposes and letter writing.
The Quechua alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet. It is used to write the Quechuan languages. The Quechua alphabet has been use in Peru since 1975, following the Officialization of Quechua by Decree Law in May 1975 that made Quechua co-equal with Spanish.
An alphabet book is a type of children's book giving basic instruction in an alphabet. Intended for young children, alphabet books commonly use pictures, simple language and alliteration to aid language learning. Alphabet books are published in several languages, and some distinguish the capitals and lower case letters in a given alphabet.
The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul or Hangeul in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern writing system for the Korean language. The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them. They are systematically modified to indicate phonetic features. The vowel letters are systematically modified for related sounds, making Hangul a featural writing system. It has been described as a syllabic alphabet as it combines the features of alphabetic and syllabic writing systems.
Inok Sava, was a Serbian monk, scribe and traveller who published a Serbian Primer (syllabary) in 1597. Of rare books designated by the National Library of Serbia, Inok Sava's Prvi srpski bukvar is considered among the rarest.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)