Well, here was the Egyptian system of picture-signs consisting of several thousand pictures of birds, beasts, reptiles, insects, trees, flowers, and objects of almost every description. Now suppose you were employed in writing _English_ by means of several thousand picture-signs and in the course of an hour would have to write the words _man_age, _man_sion, _man_tle, _man_date, might it not occur to you that it would be a good thing if that sound _man_ could be represented by the picture-sign for man ([symbol: man])? And if you had to write _trea_cle, _trea_son, _trea_ty, might you not feel like beginning these words with a tree ([symbol: tree])? At some time in the remote past Egyptian scribes--priests they usually were--noticing that syllables identical in sound were constantly recurring in the different words, began to represent these _syllable-sounds_ that occurred most frequently by _picture-signs_.[20] The picture-sign substituted for a syllable-sound was placed in the word not because it stood for an _idea_, but because it stood for a _sound_, just as in the case supposed above you would use the [symbol: man] or the [symbol: tree] not because it represented a thought, but because it had a certain sound. So certain Egyptian picture-signs began to be used to represent the sound of certain syllables. The picture-signs thus chosen were called _phonograms_. The phonogram led to the alphabet. The scribes in seeking a way to shorten their work found that the syllable itself could be broken up into separate sounds. For example, when they came to the syllable whose sound is spelled by our three letters _pad_, they found that it had three distinct sounds, namely: (1) one a lip sound which could be represented by the first sound of the picture-sign [symbol: door] (a door); (2) one an open-throat or vowel sound which could be represented by the first sound of the picture-sign [symbol: eagle] (an eagle); (3) one a dental sound which could be represented by the first sound in the picture-sign [symbol: hand] (a hand). So the scribes wrote the syllable (p-a-d) with the three characters [symbol: door] [symbol: eagle] [symbol: hand]. And so with all the other sounds in the Egyptian language; each was represented by one of the picture-signs already used. Since there were only about twenty-five distinct elementary sounds in the Egyptian language, twenty-five picture-signs were sufficient to represent any sound or any word in the language. These twenty-five picture-sounds were the letters of the Egyptian alphabet. Twenty-five characters instead of thousands! Now the Egyptian youth could learn to read in three or four years, whereas under the old system it took fifteen or twenty years, just as it takes fifteen or twenty years for the Chinese youth to learn to read well.