3.3, Alphabet

Although the people of the Germanic tribes were mostly illiterate, some of the Germanic nations had their own mode of writing, with a distinctive alphabet called runic, each letter of which was called a rune. We know that runes were used to record early stages of Gothic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, English,Frisian, Prankish and various tribal tongues of central Germania, and they may also have supplied other Germanic languages without leaving any evidence surviving till today. On archaeological grounds the earliest estant runes are dated to the second century AD. The script continued in use in some regions 'throughout the Middle Ages and into early modern times. '

The early runes were not written, but incised—runic script was designed for inscribing, at first on wood, which explains many of its characteristics. Since runes were designed for incising in wood, the letter forms, in their earliest stage, eschew curves, which are hard to cut in such a grainy material. Letters were made up of vertical strokes, cut at right angles to the grain, and of slanting strokes which stood distinct from it. Horizontal strokes, which would mingle with the grain and be hard to distinguish, were avoided. Even the earliest examples of the script show there were variations in some letter forms, so it is not possible to give a standard pattern for the Germanic runic alphabet.

The earliest known runic alphabet had twenty-four letters arranged in a peculiar order, which, from the values of its first letters, is known as the futhark. In early times texts could be written not only from left to right, but from right to left equally well. Some texts could even be written with alternate lines in opposite directions. Even in left-to-right texts an individual letter could be reversed at whim, and occasionally a letter might be inverted. There was no distinction between capital and lowercase letters.

We do not know where and when runes were invented. The obvious similarities with the Roman alphabet brought early scholars to the belief that the script first appeared among Germanic peoples living close to the Roman empire, and that the runes were an adaptation of the more prestigeous alphabet. Early finds of rune-inscribed objects in eastern Europe (Pietroassa in Rumania, Dahmsdorf in central Germany and Kowel in the Ukraine) suggest that runes may have been invented by Goths on the Danube or beside the Vistula. This is further supported by the similarity of occasional runes to letters of one or other of the Greek alphabets. However, continued discovery of early runic texts in various regions of Europe do not allow to consider the matter of the origin of runes conclusively proven.

Be it as it may, wherever and whenever they were created, runes soon spread over the Germanic world, and by 500 AD they are found not only in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, but also in Poland, Russia and Hungary, recording different Germanic languages and being cut, stamped, inlaid or impressed on metal, bone, wood and stone.

Runes were used for many centuries and in many lands, gradually changing in their passage through time and space. In England the script died out, superseded by Roman, somewhere in the eleventh century; in Germany and the Low Countries - rather sooner. In Scandinavia and its colonies, however, runes continued well into the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, the later runic inscriptions are of comparatively little interest, for there is plenty of other evidence for the state of the language they record, whereas the early inscriptions are of great importance to the linguist, for they record material for which there is otherwise lillie or no evidence.

Thus we may summarize the above discussion stating that the principal

features common to all the languages of the Germanic language area were: (1) fixation of the main stress on the initial syllable of the word; (2) the first, or Germanic sound shift affecting the Indo-European voiceless and voiced stops and the spirant [s]; (3) certain vowel changes; (4) reduction in the number of cases as compared to Common Indo-European; (5) full development of the weak declension of the adjective with a particular categorial meaning; (6) development of a dental preterite and appearance of the strong/weak verb distinction; (7) a peculiar alphabet.