Page:The Making of Latin.djvu/25

Rh it tends to remain although the actual sound of the word may have changed. For example, the Latin word which about 200 B.C. was pronounced and written deicō (with its first syllable like Eng. day) was frequently still so written in the time of Cicero, when it had long been pronounced dīcō (with its first syllable like Eng. Dee). For this and other reasons the history of the alphabet or.alphabets used to write a language is something quite different from, although sometimes connected with, the history of the language.

i

For example, the sign which in the Latin and English alphabet represents the sound f, namely, had once, in all the various Greek alphabets, represented a different sound, that of Eng. w. If we ask how the sign came to change its value, we find that the Etruscans, when in the 7th or 8th Century B.C. they took a Greek alphabet to write their own language which possessed a sound very much like Lat. f, found no sign in the Greek alphabet for that sound. The best they could do was to combine two of the Greek signs and  (the older form of H) which together properly denoted the sound of Eng. wh (pronounced fully and truly as it still is by the educated class in Edinburgh). This makeshift way of writing the sound f appears not merely in Etruscan inscriptions, but in the oldest of all the Latin inscriptions we possess, on the golden brooch found in 1871 in a tomb at Praeneste which archaeologists ascribe to about 600 B.C. The inscription runs thus:

manios med fhe-fhaked numasioi

This would be in classical Latin ‘Manius me fecit Numerio’ (on the Dative form see § 118 ; on the Perfect §§ 297 and 71). But the Romans, as by degrees they came to decide on an alphabet for Latin, with the help of their neighbours (who at that epoch