Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/40

28 of a hand, as has been suggested by Egyptologists, because Da is the hieroglyph for "Hand." That hieroglyph Da "Hand" has been disclosed in the Sumer-Aryan Dictionary to be derived from the Sumerian Da pictogram for "Hand," and the D letter-sign was until latterly a simple triangle without any signs of fingers or arm—the tail only appears in the late "Semitic" Phoenician when it had become the fashion to write many of the letters with flourishing down-strokes from their right border.

The free dialectic interchange of D with its fellow labial T in Sumerian and other Aryan languages, and the further and later change of T dialectically sometimes into Th is well illustrated by the changes which transformed the name of the first king of the Goths and other Aryans, Dar or Dar-danos into "Thor." King Dar is also called by the Sumerians Dur, which is also a form of his name in the Gothic Edda epics. In the Runes, in which the Eddas were written, the a afterwards changed often into o. When latterly D sometimes acquired dialectically the sound of Th, which sound was represented by lengthening the stem of D into Þ for the new letter Th; and thus the name Dar or Dor became spelt "Thor." Then to distinguish the old D from this closely similar letter-sign Th it has often a bar placed across its stem. Similarly the national Aryan title now spelt "Goth," was always in historical times written by the Goths themselves as God or Got, representing an early Kad, Kud or Khat or "Catti," —the th in the modern spelling of that name having been only introduced by the Romans.