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Charles Davy, in his 1772 book Conjectural Observations on the Origin and Progress of Alphabetic Writing, admits the futility of his own task from the start. He points out that the true origin of writing might be a divine gift from God to Moses, or it could be a secular human invention that we can no longer trace. Instead of offering a single clear theory, Davy presents a collection of often conflicting ideas. He begins by observing that early writing was probably a simple process. “Writing, in the earliest ages of the world, was a delineation of the outlines of those things men wanted to remember, rudely graven either upon shells or stones, or marked upon the leaves or bark of trees,” he writes.
He notes that the shapes and names of letters in Hebrew, Samaritan, Arabic, and Greek alphabets suggest they all come from a single ancient source. This leads him to a central puzzle: how did the inventors link specific sounds to specific symbols? “The great difficulty of the Invention consisted in . . . being so well acquainted with the powers and extent of human utterance, as to be able to align a sufficient number of characters for all the variety of sounds we want in Language.”
Like the character Hermogenes in Plato’s Cratylus, Davy resists the idea that letters have a strict, natural connection between their shape, sound, and name. For example, the Hebrew aleph, Arabic alif, Greek alpha, and Latin “A” all come from a character that once looked like and was named for an ox. Yet, Davy argues that claiming the sound of the letter “A” directly imitates the ox’s voice, and that this is a model for all letters, “seems a stretch beyond the unafflicted powers of human wit.”
Davy then considers the possible reasons why writing was first invented. He has many suggestions. “We may reasonably presume to have been in the service of the passions; that is, in the conveyance of our tender sentiments which no symbols can express with half the force and delicacy of a written language.” After love, he suggests commerce, imagining that an ancient merchant class might have needed writing for record-keeping. He quickly lists other possibilities: for memorializing the dead, for specifying the terms of agreements, for transferring property, and for making wills. In short, the motivations could have been sex, money, real estate, law, or the desire for immortality.
Davy seeks a visual source in the natural world to explain the strange lines that form our alphabet. Here, he crafts a conjecture that fits the religious thinking of his time. He rejects the popular idea that ancient scripts evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphics. He claims those pictograms led the Israelites toward the false worship of idols. Instead, if God revealed alphabetic writing to Moses, it was to stop the spread of idolatry. For Davy, the alphabet’s superiority over picture-based writing lies in its purity of phonetic representation. The Latin alphabet, he believes, still shows traces of “visible speech.”
He gives a detailed example: “Alpha [A] was pronounced with a considerable aperture of the mouth. Now nothing could more exactly represent the opening of the lips in profile for the purpose, than the character of this letter reclined, in which the cross bar delineated or pointed out the situation of the teeth.” In other words, he sees the written letter “A” as a direct, iconic picture of the mouth making the “ah” sound.
This idea suggests that the clarity of writing depends on a kind of sound symbolism, where the shape of a letter matches the movement of the speech organs. Yet, in making this argument, Davy seems to contradict his own earlier criticism. He had criticized Egyptian hieroglyphics for being idolatrous images. Now, he is treating alphabetic letters as perfect, almost sacred, images of speech itself. One might ask: what is writing in his view, if not another kind of idol—a set of empty squiggles that tries, but perhaps fails, to perfectly capture the breath of the soul shaped by the glottis, lips, and tongue?
Davy’s work is ultimately a collection of educated guesses, or conjectures. He does not settle on one origin story. Instead, he explores the profound difficulties of inventing a writing system and the deep human needs it might have served. His book captures the 18th-century struggle to understand one of humanity’s greatest inventions by balancing religious tradition with emerging secular curiosity.