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Say something. Go ahead, you heard me, say it and listen to yourself. Now say it about a hundred years ago. Hear it? You can hear it. Different. Speech sounds change. Accents change. You’ve changed. You think you sound the same but go back home after some distance and they’ll tell you different. And they’ll tell it to you differently. English has changed, big time, my God it’s different. It’s old. It’s medieval. Let’s think of a famous medieval person, to see how old. Somebody with a real mark of distinction. Dante. Dante Aligheri. He finished writing the Divine Comedy in 1320. He’s really really old, hundreds of years. Think of this, in this current moment we are closer in years to Dante than he was to the start of Old English. And from the Rune Poem to us he’s in the middle of the path of life. Not the runes, they’re even older, the poem, that’s where he’s equidistant. It’s just like him too. He would be.

UI is a new letter to Old English. Their U started shifting into an I pretty early on. Say it in one beat, start with U and let it have a flavor of I at the end of it, one syllable. Quick. Like what the UI is doing in extinguished and not what is happening in ruin. What did it sound like in back in the day? Old English is extinguished, the letter UI a ruin, we’ll never really know. But it had its run, UI, as a diphthong letter, two together making one. Old English had a separate pronoun for couples and partners, but that’s a ruin now too, extinguished. We don’t speak in pairs anymore.

Carve an Ur, the letter U. You know how. Now stab it up the middle with the letter Is, I. Go ahead and shoot that aurochs with an ice arrow, the evidence will melt away. Make those two runes look like one, at least for a while. Now it’s called Yr, like the Ger rune. They changed the look of the UI rune just a touch more from there by adding a bar across the top of the I part to make it look more like a Y with a macron: Ȳ. The I sound had changed to more of a long Y. Why? Everything is temporary.