[gothic-l] Re: Runes and Wulfila's alphabet

[Francisc Czobor]

Hello Brian,

--- In gothic-l at y..., babeck at a... wrote:
> ...
>   Yes, I agree with what you say, but it still does not explain why
> Wulfila chose single letters for /kw/ and /xw/ instead of digraphs
as
> in runic.

I can not imagine why he used single letters for [kw] and [xw].
Let's say that Wulfila was an early genius in phonetics and felt that
[kw] is a single sound (a labiovelar stop), and not k+w, the same for
[xw] being different from x+w. This is only a joke, but seriously
speaking I can not see another explanation. This is however in
contradiction with the fact that he used "ai" for short [e] and "au"
for short [o] (thus two letters for a single sound).

Francisc


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