Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/650

Rh 612 ALPHABET purposely put together. It has been suggested that the alphabet was at first composed of &quot; four quaternions of letters, each headed by a vowel, and the scattered position of the vowels lends itself to this arrangement ; but it must be remembered that the arrangement of the European alphabets is certainly the same as that of Phoenicia, and in the Phoenician there were breathings but no vowel symbols. Besides, the remaining letters are just as necessary as any sixteen which we might so arrange, and to all appearance just as ancient. The author of the New Cratylus, indeed (p. 170, ed. 3), actually drew up his list of fours: the three soft mornentaries headed by aleph ; then came k, followed by vau, cheth, and teth, oddly grouped as aspirates ; then the three &quot; liquids,&quot; with samckk behind them ; and lastly, pe, koph, and tau, under the care of ay in. This, of course, renders it necessary to &quot; omit caph, which is only a softened form of coph, the liquid resh, and the semi-vowel yodh, which are of more recent introduction.&quot; Also it is &quot; quite certain that at the first there was only one sibilant, samekh.&quot; In this way Dr Donaldson satisfies himself that the &quot; original Semitic alphabet contained only sixteen letters.&quot; We give this futile attempt at arrange ment with no wish to sneer at a philologer who did good work in his day, but simply to show the arbitrary nature of all such attempts, resting as they must do simply on internal evidence. If we bear in mind the history of the derivation of the Phoenician alphabet, as we have attempted to give it, from the Egyptian hieratic, we shall conclude that it is hardly probable that symbols borrowed for practical uses should have been arranged upon any scientific method ; that chance guided the general arrangement, though a few sounds obviously similar may have been put intentionally together. No argument can be drawn (as by Rodiger in his Hebrew Grammar) from the juxtaposition of two letters meaning a hand (yodh and kapfi), two meaning a head (koph and resh), &c. ; reasons have been given above for believing that these names have no relation to the original import of the signs, but were merely fanciful analogies drawn by the Phoenicians themselves; and it seems as possible that the juxtaposition may have suggested the idea of the names as that the names caused the arrange ment. But if the argument be sound, it is valid against the supposition that the order was fixed throughout on .scientific grounds. It is quite certain that the Teutonic tribes of north western Europe possessed characters of some sort before they received the Greek or Latin alphabets. These characters are generally called runes, and have been the subject of some sound scholarship and much baseless speculation. They may be divided into three main classes the Anglo-Saxon, the German, and the Scandinavian ; each of these contain a number of lists of characters, which, however, do not differ from each other more than the Greek alphabets ; and there is so much Likeness in the whole family that we may infer a common origin for all. The term rune is recognised as the name of a German letter by Venantius Fortunatus at the beginning of the seventh century, in the lines Barbara fraxineis pingatur rhuna tabellis ; Quodque papyrus agit, virgula plana valet. i.e., these characters were cut on smoothed ash-boughs. The meaning of the word run in Anglo-Saxon is a &quot; secret;&quot; and the verb rynan, which is derived from the same, means &quot; to whisper&quot; the same verb which appears in the now disused phrase, to &quot; round in the ear.&quot; Runa denoted a magician ; the word is contained in the German alrwia, the well-known designation of those prophetesses whom the German tribes venerated, which appears corrupted by Tacitus (Germ. c. viii.) into aurinia. There is sufficient evidence to show that the knowledge of these runes was confined to a small class; that they vrere uf;cd as magical characters, and also as means of augury. It was for thi.s reason undoubtedly that they were generally proscribed ou the introduction of Christianity ; and the reception of the Latin characters by the Anglo-Saxons was regarded as important as their reception of the Christian doctrines. It is impossible to believe that the barbarous inhabitants of the German forests should have worked out for them selves a genuine alphabet before they came into intercourse with the civilised nations of the south. When we remember the long process through which a pure alphabet was reached by the highly-developed nations which dwelt on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, it is utterly incredible that such success should have been achieved, as it were, per saltum, under so much more unfavourable circumstances in the West. It may be asserted with some confidence that if the runes were genuine alphabets (which there seems no reason to deny), they must have been derived from the Phoenicians in process of commerce. There is quite si;fficient similarity in several of the characters to make this view antecedently probable, but any historical proof would be extremely difficult, if not impossible. It is true that even where the characters resemble the Phoenician the names of the letters differ altogether ; but this, as we have before seen in the case of the Pho3iiicians themselves, is nowise unnatural when an alphabet is borrowed ; the form is important, the name signifies little, and new names are attached according to the fancy of the borrowers. It is highly probable, both from the meaning of the word rune itself and from the evidence of foreign writers, that these symbols were not used by their owners for any of the ordinary ends of an alphabet (except, perhaps, for inscrip tions) until the Teutonic nations came into contact Avith Greek and Roman civilisation ; by the mass of the people they were probably looked on simply as charms, the unknown symbols of an occult science. Nay, it might be held that even to the initiated they had merely a sort of hieroglyphic value, and were developed into phonetic significance only by the contact of the Greek and Roman alphabets. For this view, indeed, there is no evidence, and it is not in itself probable. But AVC should be driven to it if we were to suppose that the runes were the creation of the Teutonic intellect. These ancient characters occur plentifully on memorial stones, rings, coins, &c., in Scandinavia. In England they have been found principally in Northumbria, Mercia, and East Anglia. It has been suggested (by Mr Haigh) that this may be due to the milder principles of the Irish monks, who restored Christianity to the north of England after its fall with EdAvin in G33, and did not pursue that system of eradicating every trace of paganism Avhich had been originally commanded by Gregory. Runic Avriting was eA T en employed in the service of Christianity. Mr Kemble (Arclweologia, vol. xxviii. p. 349) interpreted Avith great ingenuity the mutilated inscription on the famous cross discovered at RuthAvell, and showed that it refers to the Crucifixion. But the Anglo-Saxon alphabet was soon early in the 7th century conformed to the Latin type, those letters of the older form alone being retained which Avere required to denote sounds that had no counterparts in Latin ; these were f (wen), and f&amp;gt; (thorn), the latter of Avhich expresses the surd breathing heard in &quot;thin:&quot; in order to express the corresponding sonant (heard in &quot;that,&quot; and confusedly denoted by the same compound th) a stroke. Avas drawn across the simple d (&amp;lt;5), and the neiv letter was called cdh. The symbol 3 is sometimes found instead of y. Curious admixtures of runes Avith Latin characters occasionally occur even to late times. Thus, in the Codex Exoniensis (p. 400, ed. Thorpe), an enigma occurs m verse, and the parts apparently of the subject to be guessed are