The ᚩ rune (O, Os) and the ᚪ (A, Ac) both started the same way, as new shapes of the ᚫ rune (Æ, Æsc) which once made the sound of the letter A, stood in the fourth position of the alphabet, and… More
Tag Archives: Runes
ᚩ
Vowels are slippery things. They shift around and we have to learn which sound differences to ignore as another person’s accent and which ones change meaning. In the earliest… More
ᚣ
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. … More
Thorn survived for ages. That kind of longevity in a dead letter deservesᛡ
IO: extinct Old English diphthong. Of the bajillions of possible sounds we can make with our voices, only a few are needed for language. We made this one redundant. Exiled. Fired its… More
ᚢ
Send air through your larynx without stopping it. Let it pass freely. Let it through, some things you just have to let go. That’s a vowel. Stop the air with your throat or mouth,… More
ᚠ
Lips to teeth, expel air, use force. Ef. Efv. Old English has no V: an F between two vowels is a V. Efen. Even. Efern. eVern. Electronic Vern.
The first letter of several ancient languages… More
ᛠ
EA. Diphthong: a compound vowel. This one is deceased, we don’t use it any more. What did EA sound like? Maybe like EO, maybe like AU, emphasis on the E or the A because all Old English… More
ᛉ
Solve for X = a stand in for consonant clusters: ks for word endings and after stressed vowels, voiced gz for before stressed vowels, unvoiced ks when it comes before a t, and kzh for the… More
ᛋ
Alveolar voiceless spirant. Send air into your mouth, almost closed, then slip it out sibilantly. See? Splendid.
Carve a line down, change your mind and go back up, no, go down again.… More
ᛈ
Voiceless bilabial stop. Send air through your mouth, now stop it, now start. Vibrate your vocal cords and you make a B, this is not that, keep your larynx still and put a little extra … More
ᛇ
Short E, mouth a little open: eh, no big deal. Let the E fall off past an O. Let it keep falling, we don’t use these sounds together anymore.
Carve a line up like a tree then bend the… More
ᛏ
Alveolar dental: tongue along teeth, gums too. Stop and start the air flow. Let your voice stay out of it.
Carve an arrow. Point it to the sky.… More
ᛄ
Ger is a little small. Look at it. ᛄ You might not be able to see. It’s bigger now, it grew over time, but the poor thing was only half sized once. Sometimes it’s carved to look… More
ᛒ
Voiced bilabial stop. Send air into your mouth. Now stop it with your lips and release. Put a little sound into it, vibrate those vocal cords.
Carve a line down. Now carve two bumps on … More
ᛖ
This is the rune for eoh, war horse, letter E. In the Cotton library manuscript called Galba A.ii (burned in a different fire from the one that got the Old English Rune Poem) the name of… More
ᛁ
Vowel, high (mouth slightly open) front (tongue forward) unrounded lax (lips) = bit, unrounded tense = bite. I and Y were very similar in Old English, the Y sounding like an I but with… More
ᛗ
Send out some air and impede it a bit with your vocal cords, press your lips together and send that air through your nose. Smell that? Mmmmm. Delicious.
Carve the rune for joy and give … More
ᚾ
N, voiced alveolar nasal. Vibrate some air through your vocal cords, stop it at the roof of your mouth with your tongue. Nope. No passage here. Send that air out through your nose.
When… More
ᛚ
Alveolar dental sonorant: using your gum ridge and teeth, leave your tongue free laterally, partially impeding your vocal resonance: now sing. Lalalalalalalahhhhh! Largo! Lalalaaaaaaaaah!… More
ᚻ
Voiceless spirant. Make a narrow aperture of your mouth and throat and leaving your vocal cords aside, force air through. Create friction, steam up the mirror.
At the beginning of … More
ᛝ
Besides being the name of a deity and a word meaning a swampy meadow, in oldest Old English, ing is a suffix of feminine nouns denoting action: feding = feeding, bletsing = blessing. … More
ᚹ
What is W? It looks like two Vs but its name says it is U doubled. It is a consonant, but in some places, and at other times, it is a vowel. What happened? Why do we have W?
Before English was… More
ᚷ
O ᚷ, you shapeshifter. You have a completely different character depending on whom you are with. Well we all know somebody like that. Chum up to the back vowels (back of tongue and soft… More
ᛟ
O ᛟ, you shapeshifter. Once you signified all O sounds, until you slipped sideways and joined up with E. Twins you were, they spelled you two ways Œþel and Eþel, depending on what you… More
D. Voiced alveolar dental stop. You use your voice and soft palate to make the sound, breath stops against teeth. Leave your larynx out of it and you make a T. D was sometimes spelled… 
Cen. Ch sound. Hard C (in phonetics a voiceless palatal velar stop) when the C is not in front of a long vowel, Keen, otherwise it makes a ch sound. Cheen. Close homonym to Cene which means… 
