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A chart showing 30 Anglo-Saxon runes A rune-row showing variant shapes. The letter sequence and letter inventory of futhorc, along with the actual sounds indicated by those letters, could vary depending on location and time. That being so, an authentic and unified list of runes is not possible.
The Greek alphabet has 24 letters; three additional letters had to be incorporated in order to reach 900. Unlike the Greek, the Hebrew alphabet's 22 letters allowed for numerical expression up to 400. The Arabic abjad's 28 consonant signs could represent numbers up to 1000. Ancient Aramaic alphabets had enough letters to reach up to 9000.
(The names of the Santali letters are related to the sound they represent through the acrophonic principle, as in the original alphabet, but it is the final consonant or vowel of the name that the letter represents: le 'swelling' represents e, while en 'thresh grain' represents n.)
Later, the Greeks kept approximations of the Phoenician names, albeit they did not mean anything to them other than the letters themselves; on the other hand, the Latins (and presumably the Etruscans from whom they borrowed a variant of the Western Greek alphabet) and the Orthodox Slavs (at least when naming the Cyrillic letters, which came to ...
The Finnish word runo, meaning 'poem', is an early borrowing from Proto-Germanic, [12] and the source of the term for rune, riimukirjain, meaning 'scratched letter'. [13] The root may also be found in the Baltic languages, where Lithuanian runoti means both 'to cut (with a knife)' and 'to speak'. [14]
The first letter of the first series is exchanged for the first letter of the second series, the second letter of the first series for the second letter of the second series, and so forth. Achbi divides the alphabet into two equal groups of 11 letters. Within each group, the first letter is replaced by the last, the second by the 10th, etc.
Similar artifacts from contemporary societies, like those of Australia, also suggest that such notches can serve mnemonic or conventional functions, rather than meaning numbers. [11] The Ishango bone is an artifact with a sharp piece of quartz affixed to one end, perhaps for engraving. It has been dated to 25,000 years ago. [13]
The Elder Futhark (named after the initial phoneme of the first six rune names: F, U, Þ, A, R and K) has 24 runes, often arranged in three groups of eight runes; each group is called an ætt [2] (pl. ættir; meaning 'clan, group', although sometimes thought to mean eight).