Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The Old English and Old Frisian Runic Inscriptions database project at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt, Germany aims at collecting the genuine corpus of Old English inscriptions containing more than two runes in its paper edition, while the electronic edition aims at including both genuine and doubtful inscriptions down to ...
The precise number of inscriptions is debatable, as some proposed inscriptions consist of a single sign, or a row of signs that may also be "rune-like", in imitation of writing, or purely ornamental. For example, a ring found in Bopfingen has been interpreted as being inscribed with a single g , i.e. a simple X-shape that may also be ornamental.
No consideration is given to the sound the rune represented in the actual inscription, and a good example of this is the ansuz rune, which could vary greatly in shape. In the oldest Younger Futhark inscriptions, it always represented a nasal a, as in French an , but later it came to represent other phonemes such as /o/.
Each rune most probably had a name, chosen to represent the sound of the rune itself according to the principle of acrophony. The Old English names of all 24 runes of the Elder Futhark, along with five names of runes unique to the Anglo-Saxon runes, are preserved in the Old English rune poem, compiled in the 7th century
The runes are written from right to left with the orientation of the runes going in the same direction, but the last words outside the runic band have the usual left-right orientation. [9] It can be dated to the first half of the 11th century because of its use of the ansuz rune for the a and æ phonemes, and because of its lack of dotted runes ...
The distinction made by Unicode between character and glyph variant is somewhat problematic in the case of the runes; the reason is the high degree of variation of letter shapes in historical inscriptions, with many "characters" appearing in highly variant shapes, and many specific shapes taking the role of a number of different characters over the period of runic use (roughly the 3rd to 14th ...
The text ends in a prayer which uses the Norse word salu for soul, which was borrowed from English and was first used in another inscription during the tenth century. [1] The runes in the prayer follow the rule that double letters are represented with only a single rune, even if one of the two letters are at the end of one word and the second ...
A church bell from Saleby, Västergötland, Sweden, containing a runic inscription from 1228 Towards the end of the 11th century, the runic alphabet met competition from the introduced Latin alphabet, but instead of being replaced, the runes continued to be used for writing in the native Old Norse language.