Just finished my epic 5,000-odd year odyssey through the evolution of alphabets, from the earliest attempts to capture the spoken word, to the English one we use today, a true mind-expander for any aspiring writer, in fact anyone with a fascination for human history. I've put the book away now and moved on, but one last snippet...
When the Romans arrived in England in 43 AD, they brought their alphabet with them - just 24 easy-to-carve letters - and at that time arguably one of the best in the world (certainly better than Ogham that the native Britons used), especially as it had a full set of vowels - earlier introduced by the Greeks before in about 500 BC, as previous alphabets mostly had none (surely nt th bst wy t gt yr thghts dwn!). But you'd think that after about 400 years of usage in England, the wonder of it would've stuck around. But it didn't.
With the Anglo-Saxon invasion that came to fill the vacuum when the Romans all went home, the new hordes abandoned any idea of it and stuck to their own squiggles - their more (for them) familiar runic writing. Which, for a long time, could be written from either left-to-right (as the Romans had settled for), or right-to-left. Not sure how you dealt with that but I suppose it meant equality for left-handed Saxons.
This is how a simple sentence - "Aside from birth and death, stories are everything." - would have been written by the Saxons...
ᚨᛊᛇᛞ ᚠᚱᛟᛗ ᛒᚢᚱᚦ ᚨᚾᛞ ᛞᛖᚦ
ᛊᛏᛟᚱᛁᛊ ᚨᚱ ᛖᚹᚱᛁᚦᛁᛜ
....so how grateful are you that the Normans sorted it out for us when they arrived in 1066, even though "our" way of writing that sentence seems to need about 9 extra squiggles that the Saxons to say the same thing.
Just thought you might like to know all that.
Cheers....
T.R.E.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>