In a way, yes. It _simplified_ the alphabet
(the younger futhark was slimmed down to 16 letters), and simplicity is a gain.
Among the pairs of homorganic stops, the rarer grapheme was eliminated in each
case. There were other simplifications as well, such as giving up some
orthographic vowel contrasts, the tendency to drop repeated letters or
syllables even across word boundaries (ali lit -> alit), and to leave nasals
unwritten if homorganic with a following stop. There is, of course, a trade-off
between simplicity and easy reading, so after a few centuries (and prolonged
contacts with literate foreigners) the viking scribes changed their minds
about simplicity and its price -- hence the new "dotted" G, D
and P and the new vowel letters. But it was already too late
-- the influence of the Latin alphabet became overwhelming.
Piotr
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2001 6:22 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] Rune-essay Mads Peder Nordbo
Well, if you don't count the partly "enigmatic" Rök and
Sparlösa stones there is a long gap in Sweden to the tenth century, and the
datings of the Blekinge stones (with g- and d-runes) is far from settled as it
seems.
> the /d/ and /g/ runes were abandoned as well,
>
leaving only B, T and K to represent the stops b/p, d/t, g/k.
Yes, but
why? Did it improve the alphabeth?