-loop)"
and --"id:r" --"id:P", likewise very liable to be confounded, were
distinguished by transforming the latter into --"id:R"; which more
recent form was not used by the Greeks of Asia Minor, the Cretans,
the Italian Achaeans, and a few other districts, but on the other
hand greatly preponderated both in Greece proper and in Magna
Graecia and Sicily. Still the older form of the --"id:r" --"id:P"
did not so early and so completely disappear there as the older
form of the --"id:l"; this alteration therefore beyond doubt is to
be placed later.--V. The differentiating of the long and short -e
and the long and short -o remained in the earlier times confined
to the Greeks of Asia Minor and of the islands of the Aegean Sea.

All these technical improvements are of a like nature and from a
historical point of view of like value, in so far as each of them
arose at a definite time and at a definite place and thereafter
took its own mode of diffusion and found its special development.
The excellent investigation of Kirchhoff (-Studien zur Geschichte
des griechischen Alphabets-), which has thrown a clear light on
the previously so obscure history of the Hellenic alphabet, and has
also furnished essential data for the earliest relations between the
Hellenes and Italians--establishing, in particular, incontrovertibly
the previously uncertain home of the Etruscan alphabet--is affected
by a certain one-sidedness in so far as it lays proportionally too
great stress on a single one of these proposals. If systems are
here to be distinguished at all, we may not divide the alphabets into
two classes according to the value of the --"id:X" as --"id:zeta"
or as --"id:chi", but we shall have to distinguish the alphabet
of 23 from that of 25 or 26 letters, and perhaps further in this
latter case to distinguish the Ionic of Asia Minor, from which the
later common alphabet proceeded, from the common Greek of earlier
times. In dealing, however, with the different proposals for
the modification of the alphabet the several districts followed
an essentially eclectic course, so that one was received here and
another there; and it is just in this respect that the history of
the Greek alphabet is so instructive, because it shows how particular
groups of the Greek lands exchanged improvements in handicraft
and art, while others exhibited no such reciprocity. As to Italy
in particular we have already called attention to the remarkable
contrast b