2 ms·
I think a couple things are important to consider here: - Though it's just another alphabet, it was independently invented. This is pretty cool. Alphabets (and
by bane 11y ago
I think a couple things are important to consider here:
- Though it's just another alphabet, it was independently invented. This is pretty cool. Alphabets (and related Abjads) have only ever been invented historically very few times and t hey tend to be variations on a few earlier systems. It's not at all obvious that this is a way to encode sounds and many more cultures use syllabaries or abugida (2 of the three native Japanese systems) or some kind of logograph system (like Chinese). Even Tsalagi ended up turning Latin characters into a syllabary.
- Runes look like they're uniquely useful for scratching into wood, just like various scripts in Mesopotamia (like Ugaritic or Akkadian) work best when pressed into wet clay with a stylus and Arabic, Chinese and Korean work best written with a brush. It's interesting how different systems have kind of an optimal medium to work in.
- pjlegato 11y agoRunes weren't independently invented. They were likely derived from Old Italic alphabets related to Latin. This is why many of the runic characters are graphically similar to their Latin equivalents. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark#Origins * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script
- bane 11y agoIt's unclear how much influence Old Italic alphabets had on the various Runics though it's generally thought that Etruscan was a shared ancestor. There's some theories that some of the similarities are the result of co-evolution or repurposing of found letter a la Tsalagi. For example, Danish Futhark uses the character for 'm' that's used as 'ph' in Etruscan (later to become greek 'phi'), obviously not a morphological change but a repurposing. Another example, Etruscan 'sh' seems to have disappeared due to confusion with a simplified 'M', which is similar to 'e' in Elder Futhark and 'i' in Gothenburg Runes. These may have simply been "loan" glyphs, adopted to fill some phonological need, in the way that English doesn't have letters for 'sh', 'ch' or 'zh'. Most of the morphology seems wholly unique in early Runic scripts, hinting at their uniqueness. But again, as Sequoyah demonstrated, loan characters often are used in more "obvious" ways like as a syllabary. There's later forms of Runes that borrow more heavily from Latin scripts, and these also seem to be more regularized and simplified over the less standard earlier scripts.