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A chart showing 30 Anglo-Saxon runes A rune-row showing variant shapes. The letter sequence and letter inventory of futhorc, along with the actual sounds indicated by those letters, could vary depending on location and time.
In Late West Saxon texts, g and h were in complementary distribution everywhere except for at the start of a word. [49] Word-initial [ɣ] never merged with [h] (/x/), but the eventual replacement of word-initial [ɣ] with the plosive [ɡ] might have been a consequence of the sound becoming phonemically reanalyzed as /ɡ/ in this position. [39]
Thus, the Anglo-Saxon futhorc has several runes peculiar to itself to represent diphthongs unique to (or at least prevalent in) Old English. Some later runic finds are on monuments , which often contain solemn inscriptions about people who died or performed great deeds. For a long time it was presumed that this kind of grand inscription was the ...
This language, or closely related group of dialects, spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, and pre-dating documented Old English or Anglo-Saxon, has also been called Primitive Old English. [ 11 ] Early Old English ( c. 650–900 ), the period of the oldest manuscript traditions, with authors such as Cædmon , Bede , Cynewulf and Aldhelm .
Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, was an early form of English in medieval England. It is different from Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and from Middle English, the language of Geoffrey Chaucer. See Old English phonology for more detail on the sounds of Old English.
The sounds /k~tʃ/ and /ɡ~j/ had almost certainly split into distinct phonemes by Late West Saxon, the dialect in which the majority of Old English documents are written. This is suggested by such near- minimal pairs as drincan [ˈdriŋkɑn] ("drink") vs. drenċan [ˈdrentʃɑn] ("drench"), and gēs [ɡeːs] ("geese") vs. ġē [jeː] ("you").
Poster for the Norwegian magazine Urd by Andreas Bloch and Olaf Krohn. Wyrd is a concept in Anglo-Saxon culture roughly corresponding to fate or personal destiny. The word is ancestral to Modern English weird, whose meaning has drifted towards an adjectival use with a more general sense of "supernatural" or "uncanny", or simply "unexpected".
The Elder Futhark rune ᛉ is conventionally called Algiz or Elhaz, from the Common Germanic word for "elk". [citation needed]There is wide agreement that this is most likely not the historical name of the rune, but in the absence of any positive evidence of what the historical name may have been, the conventional name is simply based on a reading of the rune name in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem ...