Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/60

48 placed inside the square or oval barred H sign, and is the source of the Greek θ or Theta letter. This compound sign is already found in Egypt from the First Dynasty onwards (see Plate II, col. 3). Latterly the Cadmean in its purer alphabetic system wrote the Th by the separate letters TH. In the Runes we have seen that the letter D was adapted for the later Th sound which had come into use for certain D words, by the lengthening of its stem, whereby the name of the first Gothic King Dar or Dur, became "Thor." An interesting instance of the survival of the compound letter Th in Britain is found on certain of the coins of the Pre-Roman Ancient Briton king Addedo-maros, the Aedd-mawr of the Welsh, spell his name as Aththiid.

. This vowel-sound is expressed in Sumerian by no less than six different signs, as we have seen under O. The sign which is now seen to have been selected for its alphabetic use was the simplest of all these, namely, the crescent ( or <, which when turned on its left side became ‿ or V. This crescent which pictured the setting Sun and Moon, possessed the phonetic value of U, and also that of A or Ā, with which this vowel was freely interchangeable,and explaining the use of this sign with the Ā value in the Brito-Phœnician inscription of Partolan. Its angular form also explains the confusion of this letter U with the late consonantal letter V which was introduced to replace the F, and also the confusion with the tailed V as the letter Y. And it is seen to be the source of the sixth letter in the Phoenician alphabet, the so-called Vau of the Semites and the U or Upsilon of the Greeks.

In Egyptian signaries the angular V form of U occurs in