Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/53

Rh Pretan—the Prydain of the Welsh—for "Britain," and Peirithoos for "Brutus."

The letter-sign for P is found in its early form of a shepherd's crook on Egyptian pottery from the Pre-dynastic period onwards, and in the Cadmean alphabets and "Semitic" Phœnician, and Brito-Phœnician down to the Greek (see Plate II).

The Sumerian parent of this P sign is now disclosed to be the Sumerian 𐊬 with the value of Par, Pir, Bar or Maś and defined as "a staff or sceptre, bar or mace of a leader" (see col. 1). For alphabetic use its final consonant was dropped, leaving value as Pa or Pi, and Pa already was a value of the Sumerian sceptre-sign.

The closing of the loop to form P occurs in the Runes, Iberia, Pelasgic Italy and in Latin, and on Pre-Roman Briton coins; but not in the Greek, which used this closed P for their letter R.

The aspirated P as Ph of the late Greek with the form Φ was used to replace the F when that letter was dropped in Greek. It was presumably fashioned on the type of the allied labial B as a mass divided; but this Ph sign has the general form of and is practically identical with the old form of the Q sign, which letter was also dropped in the later Greek alphabet, yet it was used for the labial W.

This explosive back guttural was used by the Sumerians, but not very extensively as an initial, though exchanging not infrequently with the hard gutturals G, K and X as we have seen under K and H.

Its old letter forms as, both divided and simply