Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/39

Rh modern small or minuscule b or is simplified and cursively looped for writing without lifting the pen.

is a late redundant and ambiguous letter of the Roman period, deriving its form from the Greek 𐌂 (or G), and standing ambiguously in its hard and soft variations for both K and S. It does not exist in the more scientific phonetic signs of the Sumerian and Phoenician, nor in the older Gothic Runes, which use K and S respectively for those sounds. See further under G, K and S.

This dental letter in its Sumerian triangular form, which shape gave its later trivial name of "Delta," is found in Egyptian "signaries" from the pre-dynastic period downwards and in that shape in all the alphabets down to the Roman, and in its later looped Cadmean form in the modern alphabets (see Plate I).

Its Sumerian parent is disclosed in two somewhat similar triangular pictograms, namely (1) the Sumerian Da, Du, "a Wedge," picturing a wedge, and borrowed by the Egyptians for their hieroglyph for their wedge-sign and its name of Da (see Plate I, cols, i and 4, and Sumer-Aryan Dict., Plate III and text), and (2) the Sumerian Du, Dun, "a Hill or Dune," picturing a conical mound with three lines as the plural sign, which thus discloses the Sumerian origin of the Egyptian neo-archaic hieroglyph of Du for "Hill" with its picture of two hills. This latter form is significantly preserved in the double triangle for the letter D in the Runes (see Plate I, col. 18). It is presumably owing to D being derived from the Sumerian Da, Du that in Spanish the letter is pronounced Du.

This letter D does not appear to have arisen in the picture