--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> Why dumber? They were quite clever. It takes some sophistication to
realise that p/b, t/d and k/g are natural pairs of phonologically
related sounds. I suppose the scribes intended to make the spelling
system more economic by abandoning those early futhark characters
that seemed to be redundant.
If it was so redundant, why then the later dotted g,d,p-runes?
Did the languages change that rapidly in the Viking age?
Younger futhark inscriptions are less "phonetic" but still
intelligible, so there was no serious loss in terms of encoding
efficiency. You could just as well wonder why Modern English speakers
are so dumb -- they have so many vowels and so few vowel letters.
As an amateur I guess that vowels are less important, many other
languages also has few vowels.
But I see your point
> Piotr