I into I and J, and VV or UV into double U = W. The Anglo-Saxon, which appears to be partly Roman and partly Irish in origin, had borrowed two useful characters from the Runic, Þ = w, named _wen_, and Þ = th, named _thorn_, which for a time formed part of the English alphabet. The _thorn_ has been revived of late, as a bastard archaic, in the printing of _the_ as _y^e_, with consequent mispronunciation of that word by those who see it thus changed. Both Y and Z were late importations from the Greek into the Latin, being used only in Greek loan-words to denote sounds peculiar to the Greek; hence, as the most recent arrivals, their appearance at the end of the alphabet. Some of our letters are of little use; K makes C superfluous, and Q and X are of no more service to us than they were to the Romans. So that, for practical purposes, we have only twenty-three letters wherewith to indicate at least thirty-two sounds. Thus our alphabet, like our spelling (which is ever at war with our pronunciation, to the bewilderment of school children and foreigners), is what it is from the lack of any consistent rule. Nevertheless, so workable a set of signs has secured a footing which, made firmer by the art of printing, is not likely to be disturbed by any processes of phonetic change which mark the course of speech. To that art of printing is also due those modifications in handwriting which distinguish the penmanship of past and present times. As has been seen, while Germany remained in fetters to the eye-distracting Black letter, we freed ourselves by adoption of the clear Roman type; hence the disappearance, save in legal documents and a few show art-books, of the cramped hand which prevailed down to the sixteenth century. So the handwriting of to-day (good, bad, and indifferent, as the personal equation of each one of us shapes it), which we learned at school through the stages of "pot-hooks and hangers" to the grandest flourishes of copy-book "maxims," is derived from the same source as the printed alphabet. [Illustration: GENEALOGY OF THE ENGLISH ALPHABET.] CHAPTER XI RUNES AND OGAMS The Runic alphabet originated among the Scandinavians, who probably adapted it from some other script, since no traces of any pictographic characters whence it may have been derived have been found. Some scholars hold that it is derived from the "Phœnician" alphabet; others say that it comes from the Latin. Canon Taylor has a definite theory that it is a degraded form of the Greek alphabet; for in the sixth century B.C. the Goths swarmed in the region south of the Baltic and east of the Vistula, and in their trading relations with Greek colonists north of the Black Sea may readily have obtained a knowledge of the Greek alphabet. The question, however, of origin remains, and is likely to remain, unsettled.