Page:The Aryan Origin of the Alphabet.djvu/71

Rh restricted "Semitic" Phœnician of 22 letters, but the Ō or Omega, the late concluding letter of the Greek version is omitted. The third letter from the end is represented by an upright or semi-sloping cross +, and represents undoubtedly the X of the Greek, the letter to which Greek scholars give the value of Ch as we have seen. On the other hand, the 15th letter which occupies the identical place of the X or Xi of Greek scholars, and which we have seen represents the three-barred S of the Phœnician, is here given the unusual form of three semi-upright bars twice crossed, which, however, seems more like an S than an X, and approaches in form the correspondingly placed squarish Samekh S of the Hebrew. The last two letters are Ph or W and the sign read in the Runes variously as X, A and I, but by Greekscholars as Ps.

Fig. 1. — The Formello Alphabet of about seventh century B.C.

This shows that the Early Cadmean Phœnician alphabet existed about the seventh century B.C. in substantially the same serial order as in the present-day alphabet, allowing for the dropping of the obsolete letters Ṣ, S' and Th, and the transference of Z to the end place by the Romans, when they displaced it from its seventh place or station to make room for G which they displaced from its original place third in the list into which they foisted their new form of G as C.

These changes in the old order of the letters are shown in the accompanying table, in which the letters of the first three columns are given their modern letter values. The familiar order of the letters in our alphabet or ABC appears to be, not as is generally supposed a merely capricious or accidental collocation of the letters, but a scientific arrangement of the letters according to their sounds. It was long ago noticed that in the Phœnician, Greek and Latin