3.3. Alphabet

The people of the Germanic tribes were mostly illiterate but some of the Germanic nations had their own mode of writing. They had a distinctive alphabet called runic and each letter of which was called a rune. We know that runes were used to record early stages of Gothic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, English, Frisian, Frankish, etc.

The earliest known runic alphabet had twenty-four letters arranged in a peculiar order, which, from the values of its first letters, is known as the futhark. (фусок – рунический алфавит, назван по названию шести первых букв). In early times texts could be written not only from left to right, but from right to left equally well. Some texts could even be written with al’ternate (чередующийся) lines in opposite directions. Even in left-to-right texts an individual letter could bе reversed at whim, and occasionally a letter might be inverted (опрокинута). There was no distinction between capital and lower­case letters.

We do not know where and when runes were invented. The obvious similarities with the Roman alphabet brought early scholars to the belief that the script first appeared among Germanic peoples living close to the Roman empire, and that the runes were an adaptation of the more prestigeous alphabet. Early finds of rune-inscribed objects in eastern Europe (in Rumania, in central Germany and in the Ukraine) suggest that runes may have been invented by Goths on the Danube or beside the Vistula. This is further supported by the similarity of occasional runes to letters of one or other of the Greek alphabets.

Runes soon were spread over the Germanic world, and by 500 AD they are found not only in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, England, but also in Poland, Russia and Hungary.

Runes were used for many centuries and in many lands, gradually changing in their passage through time and space.

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Thus we may summarize the above discussion stating that the principal features common to all the languages of the Germanic language area were: (i) fixation of the main stress on the initial syllable of the word; (ii) the first, or Germanic sound shift affecting the Indo-European voiceless and voiced stops and the spirant [s]; (iii) certain vowel changes; (iv) reduction in the number of cases as compared to Common Indo-European; (v) full development of the weak declension of the adjective with a particular categorial meaning; (vi) development of a dental preterite and appearance of the strong/weak verb distinction; (vii) a peculiar alphabet.