Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 1.djvu/651

Rh ALPHABET 613 written in runes; the odd effect is increased by these runes being written in the. regular way (sometimes they were written /Jouorpo^Sov) from right to left, contrary to the general run of the words. Keinble, in the Archceologia, has given an interesting translation of an Anglo-Saxon poem, each stanza of which begins with the name of a runic ! : tier; thus the first stanza begins with Fesh, &quot;money,&quot; the name of f, the first runic letter, and goes on to say - &quot; Money is a consolation To every man : Yet shall every man Liberally distribute it ; Klie will that, before God, Honour shall fall to his lot. 1 The second stanza is dedicated to the bull, Ur (u}, the third to thorn (th), &c. This poem accordingly gives the order of the alphabet, which agrees in the main with that of all other runic alphabets. Yet the poem is not old, for the name of s (Sigel, &quot; the sun &quot;) is treated by the writer as though it had been Segel &quot; a sail &quot; clearly a mistake of a later time, when the true name had passed out of use. It may be added that the names of this alphabet are some times strangely abstract ; thus we find &quot; gift,&quot; &quot; hope,&quot; &quot; need,&quot; &quot; war,&quot; which differ much from the very concrete objects which the Phoenicians chose to denote their letters. In consequence of all these old alphabets beginning with the letters //, th, o, r, c, in the same order, the alphabets are called by some antiquarians &quot;futhorcs,&quot; just as we commonly speak of the ordinary alphabet as the ABC. The doctrines of Christianity were first presented to a Teutonic people in a written form by Ulfilas, who, though not the first successful missionary to the Goths, has thereby established his claim to be regarded as the apostle of his race ; and while the main body of the Goths, spurning the weak control of Rome, poured westward in their fierce career of victory towards Italy and Spain, a remnant was left in Mocsia, to whom Ulfilas gave the gospel in their own tongue. This was at the end of the 4th century of our era. lie employed an alphabet of twenty-four or twenty-five letters, some of which are unmistakably Greek in form ; others are common (or nearly so) to the Greek and the runic alphabets, and may therefore have been derived from cither ; but if they were runic, they at least received a more rounded form, it being no longer necessary to retain those angles which (as we saw above in describing the cuneiform characters) were most convenient in days when writing meant cutting on stone or wood. But some of the letters seem to be beyond doubt runic : most clearly so are/, r, u, y, and the symbol for the compound sound l:w ; and the reason for all these (except ?) appears to be the lack of a proper equivalent in Greek. The letter which Ulfilas adopted to denote the surd breath th is not runic, so that the Gothic and Anglo-Saxon alphabets here differ: it is apparently the Greek &amp;lt;. It would seem, therefore, that this letter still denoted an aspirate (p h) in Greek, and not a breath, otherwise it would surely have been taken for/; here, on the contrary, it seems to have been selected at random from a list of symbols which denoted no corre sponding sounds in Gothic. On the same lack of principle G was taken to denote hw. X was the exponent of the breath ch, as heard in German words : here the difference between the true aspirate and the breath is not great. Long o formed a symbol which is very like omtga. Another alphabet which has had an important influence on Europe, and which may be destined to a yet wider extension as the alphabet (in a modified form) of the great and progressive Russian empire, is the Cyrillic. This was the work of Cyril, a monk of Constantinople, who, together with Methodius preached the gospel among the Sclavonic tribes of Bulgaria and Moravia, in the 9th century, long after the Teutons had come under the influ ence of Christianity. Cyril held the services of the church among his new converts in the vulgar tongue, into which he also translated certain books of the Scriptures. The alphabet which he employed for this purpose is more thoroughly Greek than that of Ulfilas ; but since the Greek alphabet was not nearly sufficient to express all the Sclavonic sounds especially the numerous sibilants ha added further signs, the history of which is not clear. This alphabet has been largely adopted by the eastern branches of the Sclavonic race, including the Russians, Bulgarians, and the Illyrian division of the Sclaves. The old Bulgarian (commonly called the Ecclesiastical Sclavonic) is the language into which Cyril translated the Scriptures ; in philology it holds the same rank as the Gothic has among the Teutonic languages : it is the parent, however, only of one of the least important dialects, the modern Bulgarian. The Illyrian family is divided into the Servians on the one hand, and the Croats and Slovenian peoples on the other. These parties are separated by difference of religion : the Servians belong mainly to the Greek Church, while the others are exclusively Roman Catholic ; and the members of the Greek Church naturally cling to tho Cyrillic characters, while the Catholics have adopted the Latin alphabet. It is not easy to predict which characters will ultimately predominate. The Latin letters are in sufficient to express the Sclavonic sounds; but this deficiency can be eked out by diacritical signs, and the greatest literary activity is shown by the Latinising party. Lastly, the Cyrillic alphabet has been adopted by the Wallachians, through the influence of their Sclavonic neighbours, though it is little adapted to express their essentially Latin speech, derived from the colonists whom Trajan settled in the new Roman province of Dacia. Most of the needless symbols have been dropped in the newest form of the Wallachian alphabet. (See Max Miiller, Survey of Languages, pp. 39-84.) Cyril s original alphabet consisted of forty-eight symbols, but some of these are slightly different representations of the same sound; others are tachygraphies for combina tions of sound, as sht, ts, &c. The names were not Greek, with the exception of three ksi, ,psi, and tliita which were relegated to the end as unnecessary, but they retained their, original Greek place as numerical signs. The alphabet is printed at the end of this article. It will be seen that B occupies the third place, while a modified B stands second: the reason is, that B had come to denote the v sound in Greek, and therefore carried this value into the Sclavonic. The modified letter denotes the old b sound. The 7th letter, which is not Greek, had the sound of English softy, a little softer than the French j in jamais. The 8th and 9th symbols are the Greek s and z: they are supposed to have had the same sound, that of the soft English 2 (not dz) perhaps one of them may have originally denoted dz, a sound which easily passes into dj; dj had a special symbol both in the Servian and Wallachian, though it had none in the Cyrillic, probably because the sound had not then been produced; if it had, we may conclude, from the exactness which the Cyrillic alphabet everywhere shows, that it would not have been left without a mark. The 8th letter has been expelled from the Russian alphabet as superfluous: the Russians have no dj sound. The 10th and llth letters were sounded alike as i; the 10th is the Greek Eta, which had therefore become undistinguishable from Iota in Cyril s day, as it is in modern Greek. The 12th letter, / pure and simple, denoted the semi-vowel y. The 22d was t, followed by a parasitic y. The 23d and 24th are only different ways of writing the same combination ou; the Greeks having changed the u sound into u, Cyril was obliged to write ou for, as the Greeks themselves did. The Russian has one symbol (y) to denote this sound: it is