etaonsh wrote:
>
> --- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Marco
> Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@...>
> wrote:
> > Etaonsh wrote:
> > > I found your post on Gaulish and
> > > Lepontic runes [...]
> >
> > Gauls and Leponti had nothing to
> do with runes.
> >
> That seems a rather peevish point
> particularly unfair on Celts, who
> have no Celtic word I know of to
> describe letters found on stones. I
> could have said 'glyphs' but that
> would be Greek.

The word "rune" in English refers to a particular sort of alphabetic
writing system that happens to be attested mostly in Scandinavia and
also appears in other Germanic-speaking areas, whose letterforms most
likely derive from North Italic alphabets that in turn developed out of
the Etruscan.

> > The Celtic inscription of Northern
> Italy and Switzerland are in a form
> of
> > the Etruscan alphabet, which is
> nearly Latin inscription.


> > I guess that it is just a
> coincidence that Latin had no /th/
> or /รพ/ phoneme
> > to use that letter for, right?
> >
> No, the point is that the Roman
> influence repeatedly imposed 'th' on
> cultures who had a single letter for

This is utter piffle. Or, perhaps, balderdash. How does "Roman
influence" "impose" details of orthography?

Moreover, nowhere in the world did a roman alphabet _replace_ a runic
alphabet; in a few places they coexisted in different cultural realms,
but there are no instances of runic texts being supplanted with the same
sorts of texts only written with a roman alphabet.

> it. Furthermore it could be argued
> pyscholinguistically that the
> absence of fricatives like 'th' in
> Roman expresses their psyche and
> values: a mellifluous but
> restrictive, pointless and
> ultimately inefficient purity.

No, it couldn't.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...