Page:Studies in Lowland Scots - Colville - 1909.djvu/32

10 a variety of printing or graving that has become more and more cursive. Thus s, which has now its familiar serpentine form, shows, as a Rune, three lines en zigzag, as in the oldest form of the Gr. sigma. Again, the Runes had names attached to them, showing their pictorial or hieroglyphic origin. Thus the first is f = faihu, the Go. cattle ; Sc. fee, Ger. vieh, just as in Heb. al-eph is the ox. O is ôthal an heirloom, inheritance, not extant in Gothic, but in Orkney applied as udal to a form of land tenure, and as udaller familiar to readers of Scott's "Pirate." The Norsemen in Ireland made it O'Dell. T again is Tius (Tues-day), the Northern Jove, wielder of the thunderbolt, which indeed the character symbolises, for it is nothing but the Government broad arrow. Wulfila significantly eschews the use of this heathen name. But that his people must have been familiar with Runes and their names, is believed to be proved from a curious Viennese MS. of the ninth century containing the Gothic alphabet, with the recognised Runic names for the letters. Not many of the Runes, however, were adopted by Wulfila without modification under Greek influence. A is more Runic than Greek; b, i, r, are common to both systems. The Rune u seems clearly repeated in Gothic, yet Prof. Skeat regards it as a Lat. u inverted. He is equally determined to ignore Runes in the case of o, which symbol reproduces a Rune very fairly, yet some see in it Gr. omega, and Skeat the inversion of a Gr. contraction for ou ȣ. Some of the symbols are certainly Greek:—g (hard), e, k, l, n, p, w (upsilon), and ch, used merely in such proper names as Christos. Wulfila does not give ch its Runic nasal force, for which he doubles g as in Greek, e.g. briggan, to bring. From the Latin alphabet he borrowed, it is thought, d, h, m, s, t, and f, of which the two first are not at all Runic, but m is equally Runic and Latin, though with a different phonetic value, and s, t, and f can be easily traced to Runes. Gothic j (as y in yes) Skeat gets from Lat. g, yet this, too, looks like a modified Rune of similar value. There remain the characteristically Gothic kw, hw, and th. The first Mr. Douse regards as a Eune for qu, used as a number = 90, but Prof. Skeat the Lat. u. Hw cannot be accounted for; but Prof. Skeat considers it Gr. theta, while to explain the thoroughly Teutonic th-symbol he resorts to the far-fetched