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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: English alphabet history?
In-Reply-To: donald@srd.bt.co.uk's message of 25 Oct 1994 13:08:47 GMT
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Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 18:28:34 GMT
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In article <38j00v$ge@pheidippides.axion.bt.co.uk> donald@srd.bt.co.uk
(Donald Fisk) writes:

>The North Germanic languages, and even early Old English, were written in
>the Runic alphabet before variants of the Roman alphabet were adopted.

[copy of my .sig elided --rma]

>No flame intended, but I would have expected a Tolkein fan to have been aware
>of this.

I was of course aware of this, but it was irrelevant to the original question,
which posed a mixture of German and French as the origin of the English
alphabet.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
