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In a tale from Bede's Ecclesiastical History (written in Latin), a man named Imma cannot be bound by his captors and is asked if he is using "litteras solutorias" (loosening letters) to break his binds. In one Old English translation of the passage, Imma is asked if he is using "drycraft" (magic, druidcraft) or "runestaves" to break his binds. [15]
The Old English Latin alphabet generally consisted of about 24 letters, and was used for writing Old English from the 8th to the 12th centuries. Of these letters, most were directly adopted from the Latin alphabet, two were modified Latin letters (Æ, Ð), and two developed from the runic alphabet (Ƿ, Þ).
A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/. The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the classical Latin alphabet 's P , [ 4 ] or Q , [ citation needed ] or from the Rhaetic's alphabet 's W . [ 5 ]
Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic alphabet, Middle Scots, and some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia but was later replaced with the digraph th, except in Iceland, where it survives.
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 ...
Old English alphabet may refer to: . Anglo-Saxon runes (futhorc), a runic alphabet used to write Old English from the 5th century; Old English Latin alphabet, a Latin-derived alphabet used to write Old English from the 8th to the 12th centuries
Eth (/ ɛ ð / edh, uppercase: Ð , lowercase: ð ; also spelled edh or eð), known as ðæt in Old English, [1] is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called edd), and Elfdalian. It was also used in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, but was subsequently replaced with dh , and later d .
In very early Old English the o-e ligature ethel (Œ œ) also appeared as a distinct letter, likewise named after a rune, œðel. [citation needed] Additionally, the v–v or u-u ligature double-u (W w) was in use. In the year 1011, a monk named Byrhtferð recorded the traditional order of the Old English alphabet. [2]