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

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Hi Francisc,
you wrote:
>I don't know why used he single letters for [kw] and [xw] instead of
>digraphs. Maybe Wulfila was an early genius in phonetics and realized
>that [kw] is a single sound (a labiovelar stop) and not k+w, the same
>for [xw] being different from x+w. This is of course a joke, but I can
>not see another explanation. However, it is in contradiction with the
>fact that he used the digraphs "ai" and "au" for the short [e] and
>[o].

Just a small remark, probably not relevant, just an idea:
Could it have something to do with initials? I know from Norwegian where
we still have this "hv" sound (h is mute) that I do not know of any examples
where it occurs in the middle of a word. Maybe it was important to have
different symbols for all initials that were not vowels. Maybe in order to
mark in writing alliterating initials by means of unique characters?
Keth



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