Elder Futhark used to write in Migration period Germanic dialects.Besides, some words, such as personal names, simply cannot be translated into the ancient Germanic languages for which the original runic systems were invented.

So even if you don’t write in modern English, it doesn’t solve all of the riddle. Runes were used phonetically, that is literally as people heard what they pronounced. Like both ‘through hardships to the stars’ and ‘thru hardships 2 the stars’ having equal rights to be ‘right’ variants. What’s worse, ancient Germanic tribes did not have any orthography, either. However, there are no accepted rules for using runes to stand for modern English phonemes. Europeans needed centuries to invent rules that everybody accepted for Roman letters to represent the sounds of their languages. This example might seem forced, but ancient Greek historians had exactly the same difficulties with ancient Persian names. For ‘w’ and ‘r’ he would have only similar counterparts. To be sure, he would be stuck with both ‘sch’ and ‘z’, since no such sounds (phonemes) existed in his mother tongue. The nature of these rules may be illustrated by the following mental experiment: force Seneca who spoke Latin and knew no other language to write the modern German word schwarz (‘black’). We may use them to this end, but we have to invent some rules for this new and unnatural application. Runic alphabets cannot and should not transcribe modern languages. In fact it took about a millennium to adapt the alphabet we know today for various vernacular uses.

It may seem that taking an alphabet devised for one language (Latin in this example) and using it for another one or a whole set of different languages works all right. How it WorksĪll European and many other languages use Roman letters. To begin, one has to look into how it works, and then figure out what kind of inscription is needed, since each type of converting into runes requires a separate approach. This guide will help you through all the necessary steps. If you want to write something in Norse runes, you have probably discovered that the task is rather challenging.

Elder futhark runes pdf