How the Germanic Futhark Came from the Roman Alphabet

This paper has a narrow purpose: to show how the Germanic futhark came into being. The intent is to explain the development of the older futhark from its source, the Roman script — or more precisely, to show how individual runes of the futhark derive from individual letters of the Roman alphabet. I shall argue that the orthographic transformations that brought the futhark into existence are largely guided by certain governing principles that systematically effect language change in both spoken and written systems