Runes do not seem to have come into use among the Western Germans, that is, the tribes which occupied the region which we now call Germany. Hrabanus Maurus, in the tenth century, wrote about the runes of the Marcomanni, and gave figures of them. This has led German writers to assert the existence of Runic letters among the Suevi in the early days of the Roman empire; but Hrabanus adds to "Marcomanni" the gloss "quos nos Northmannos vocamus." His Marcomanni were not the Marchmen of the Roman period. Bede is also said to have formulated a list of the runes of the Northmen. One reason which retarded the educational advancement of the Western Germans was that they never came into contact with the Romans till the beginning of the first century B.C., and even then only for a short time, in the invasion of the republic by the Cimbri and Teutones. They were shut away from the Roman frontiers by the buffer states of Celtic countries, and it was only after the conquest of Gaul, Rhætia, and Noricum that the Romans came into continuous conflict with Marcomanni and Suevi. It was Cæsar who first made the name of Germani historical, and Tacitus who invented Germania as the name of the country. The name Germani is, as Zeuss suggests, Gallic for "Neighbours," and was pronounced _Gármani_ by the Gauls, who had first been asked by the Romans how their neighbours were called. It is curious that even in this country the Britons called the invading English _Garmani_, by what Bede supposed to be a corruption of speech. (The Celts in later days were not Latinised Britons, and knew nothing of {31}Germans. They made no distinction between Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, but called them all Saxons.) The name by which the Germans call themselves is not a race name, but merely the adjective meaning national, native, vernacular. Just as the Italians afterwards used the phrase _in volgare_ to mean "in Italian," as distinguished from Latin, so the Germans had the word _diutisc_ or _thiutisc_ (deutsch) to mean vulgar, as opposed to _walahisc_ or _walesc_ (welsch), which meant Latin. The two adjectives became in time proper names, with the sense of German and Roman. The Western Germans had nothing to do with writing till they conquered the Welshmen of Gaul. Consequently, we proceed to the Gothic alphabet.