The Etruscan Origin of the Roman Alphabet and the Names of the Letters

The evidence, new and old, which Hammarstr6m' has brought together makes it certain, to my mind, that the Latin alphabet and the Latin names of the letters are of Etruscan origin. This view is not so inconsistent as it seems with the older idea that the Romans borrowed their alphabet directly from Italian Greeks. The new view distinguishes an older from the later Etruscan alphabet and derives the Latin alphabet from the former. This older alphabet is identical with that which scholars formerly thought was Greek. The early abecedaria (Marsiliana, Formello, Caere) are Etruscan rather than Greek. But even in Hammarstr6m's opinion the Romans were forced at an early period to borrow some letters of the alphabet from the Greeks. In Etruscan there was no distinction between surds and sonants, and consequently the letters B, D, K, Q were not used. This fact furnishes one of the arguments for the Etruscan origin of the Roman alphabet, as it explains the early Roman use of the character C for both c and g. How, then, did the Romans come by B and D? Hammarstr6m is forced to the conclusion that they borrowed them directly from the Greeks. But he does not explain satisfactorily why they did not adopt the Greek practice of using C only for g and expressing their c sound by K. While K and Q were given up in later Etruscan, they are found i early inscriptions, so that Hammarstrom has no difficulty in deriving these Latin letters from Etruscan. The letters 0 and X likewise are missing in Etruscan, so that again Hammarstrom is led to assume direct borrowing from the Greeks by the Romans. A strong objection to this view is that the Romans would probably have added the four new letters at the end of the alphabet, as they did later with Y and Z, instead of inserting them in their original places. 1 "Beitrage zur Geschichte des etruskischen, lateinischen und griechischen Alphabets," Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae, XLIX (1920), 2. [CLASSICAL PHIOLOGY, 1I, October, 1927] 372