Modern English in futhorc

English rune futhorc

Note

I am NOT a linguist, so this scheme looks not so good in my opinion (even sucks?). Some people have already made their own scheme with IPA and seems to complete avoid the problem of the Latin alphabet. Link will be put here, and of course, you are welcome to read my “toys” and give some suggestions.

http://futhorc.com/futhorc/runic.php

https://rune.school/blog/

The beginning

I have wanted to do it for a long time, which is to make English written in runes with phonetic spellings. Although there are some converters on the Internet, most of which just replace the letters with runes. It would be better to do it directly with English itself.

For those who are interested in those converters, I suggest a visit to http://futhorc.com/futhorc/runic.php, which processes it by the sounds of Modern English words, achieved by using different kinds of runes. For example, the k-rune in the Elder Futhark turned into ᚴ (transliteration as k) in the Younger Futhark, and ᚳ (transliteration as c) in the Anglo-Saxon futhorc. The converter takes the former to present /k/ and the latter for sh-sound (/ʃ/).

Back to the project, it means to build a system for English, so it is none of the business of converters. Writing English in runes sounds easy, as there are several historical schemes to refer to. Originally, I would like to copy the futhorc directly and make some extra modifications. It looks perfect: Anglo-Saxon is also called the Old English, so how can it go wrong?

However, after some tries, I found I was cooked, not only because I am NOT a real linguist, but also due to its weird, unpredictable pronunciation, caused by the massive differences between Old English and Modern English (how can they just borrow so many Latin words???). I did know the differences, but I never noticed how ridiculous it is, plus all the dialects it has, making Modern English, a fusion of Romance and Germanic, not suitable with runes.

It happened when I was young, and I am an adult now, but I still wanna try, as currently I am living in Europe and mainly speaking a broken English. The main reason to finishing it is that I am not so perfectionism as before. It is almost impossible to make English phonetic spellings, like how Old English did, so the goal is dropped, and after replacing all the letters, we will check how much we can still do for it.

The runic alphabet

So, here bring back the futhorc again, which already solved half of the things. The only thing to do is to remove the elements not existing in Modern English any more, which means in this step, the letters are just replaced by the transliteration of runes, without considering their actual pronunciations. Moreover, to make it clearer, instead of using the traditional way, the list will be in the alphabetic order.

Letter	Rune	Letter	Rune
A	ᚪ	O	ᚩ
B	ᛒ	P	ᛈ
C	ᚳ	Q
D	ᛞ	R	ᚱ
E	ᛖ	S	ᛋ
F	ᚠ	T	ᛏ
G		U	ᚢ
H	ᚻ	V
I	ᛁ	W	ᚹ
J	ᛡ / ᛄ	X	ᛉ
K		Y	ᚣ
L	ᛚ	Z
M	ᛗ	TH	ᚦ
N	ᚾ	NG	ᛝ

These are basic stuff from the Codex Vindobonensis 795, which needs to be extended, as there are still many blanks, also combinations, digraphs, and diphthongs need to be added.

But how? Surely, we will use our imagination, but before that, there are some extra things from manuscripts, with which letters like K, Q and G can be filled, plus an ST combination. Then how about V and Z?

Well, for V, as I am a badass, I would like to make U and V the same thing, like what Latin does, which will also bring English some romantic flavour (?). For Z, it will go to S, which will avoid one of the major differences in BrE and AmE: -ise or -ize.

Letter	Rune	Letter	Rune
A	ᚪ	O	ᚩ
B	ᛒ	P	ᛈ
C	ᚳ	Q = KW	ᛢ
D	ᛞ	R	ᚱ
E	ᛖ	S = Z	ᛋ
F	ᚠ	T	ᛏ
G	ᚸ	U = V	ᚢ
H	ᚻ	W	ᚹ
I	ᛁ	X	ᛉ
J	ᛡ / ᛄ	Y	ᚣ
K	ᛣ
L	ᛚ	TH	ᚦ
M	ᛗ	NG	ᛝ
N	ᚾ	ST	ᛥ

Now there is a basic Modern English alphabet by futhorc, in which each rune presents a letter, and we can use it to write now. It’s time to add more features to it, as I guess no one will deny making it phonetic spellings. However, before entering the next step, it is just a reminder: as I mentioned before, almost no one can really standardise Modern English. Those who are interested in this topic can read more about spelling reform on Wikipedia.

As we all know, in English, one letter can represent multiple pronunciations depending on their position in a word and the context. For example, the pronunciation of the letter a can be /æ/ (cat), /eɪ/ (cake), /ɒ/ (wash), /ɔː/ (wall), /ɑː/ (bar), /ɪ/ (private) and the schwa /ə/ (about). Other vowels are better, usually just two or three varieties, so they can be handled later, or just keep those already used.

If you visit the converter website above, you might notice their scheme, which is listed by their IPA equivalents. As I mentioned before, it is achieved by mixing different runic alphabets, including futhorc (aka Anglo-Saxon Runes), Younger Futhark (Scandinavian runes), and futhork (Medieval runes). It is not what we need, so this scheme, unfortunately, should be dropped.

ᚪ is what current presents A, but we could use Æ to mean /æ/, so we could copy a rune from futhorc, which is ᚫ, so we can separate one major variety from the mess. /ɒ/ and /ɔː/ are similar (one for short, one for long), so they can be grouped together, plus the /ɑ/ in AmE (if any), and get presented by ᚩ. Then other sounds except schwa should go to the ᚪ, the original one.

While /ɒ/ and /ɔː/ will be presented by ᚩ, it is reasonable to distinguish O-sounds, which usually are /ɒ/ (bot), /uː/ (move), /ʌ/ (come), and maybe a schwa like eloquent. It seems that only /uː/ and /ʌ/ will be left, and /ʌ/ will go to U, while /uː/ to another sounds.

I made a whole graph including all vowels, and it looked like another mess I don’t like, so I stopped it for a while. However, during this time, I read some Tolkien, and I found that Tolkien had already made some attempts in his novels, and some data can be found here.

I don’t know if his idea is the same as mine, but it appears that it is the same work. So I think his work can be used here, by which the OO-sound can also be added. Furthermore, the rune for the letter G is changed to gyfu from ger. The schwa won’t be separated, as doing so will decrease the readability. For double or more vowels letters, just put the default options together if not specified. It is not good getting too many rules.

Letter	Rune	IPA	Letter	Rune	IPA
A [*]	ᚪ	/eɪ/, /ɑː/, /ɪ/, /ə/	O [u]	ᛄ	/uː/
A [æ]	ᚫ	/æ/	OO [o]	ᚩ	/ɒ/
A [o]	ᚩ	/ɒ/, /ɔː/, /ɑ/ (AmE)	OO [u]	ᛄ	/ʊ/, /uː/
B	ᛒ		P	ᛈ
C	ᚳ		Q = KW	ᛢ
D	ᛞ		R	ᚱ
E	ᛖ	/ɛ/, /i:/	S = Z	ᛋ
F	ᚠ		T	ᛏ
G	ᚷ		U = V	ᚢ	U: /ʊ/, /uː/, /ʌ/, /ju:/, /ə/
H	ᚻ		W	ᚹ
I	ᛁ	/ɪ/, /i:/, /aɪ/,/ə/	X	ᛉ
J	ᛡ		Y	ᚣ
K	ᛣ
L	ᛚ		TH	ᚦ
M	ᛗ		NG	ᛝ
N	ᚾ		ST	ᛥ
O [*]	ᚩ	/ʌ/, /əʊ/, /ə/	EE	ᛟ	/i:/
O [o]	ᚩ	/ɒ/	EA	ᛠ	/i:/, /ɛ/

It looks good, so we can start adding more combinations to it. What should be added can be witnessed from English phonology, including SH, SCH, CH, QU (which is equal to KW), GU and my favourite GH, which can be borrowed from Tolkien or some manuscripts. Note that the GH is optional, so it is possible to use the one from Tolkien, which I just can’t find it in the runic alphabets.

Letter	Rune	IPA
CC	ᛇᛋ	/ks/, /k/
CH	ᚴ	*
SH SCH SC	ᚻᛋ	/s/, /z/
	ᛋᚳ	/sk/
		/ʃ/
GH	ᛤ	*
GU	ᚷᚹ	/gw/, /g/

The whole table with colour is shown below as a picture, with orange the original futhorc, blue the second modification, green from Tolkien, and purple for the final modification.

Numbers

I can hardly find any documents about runic number. It looks like those people never use numbers or something. Perhaps the only way to find out is through the Runic calendar.

It is still possible to figure it out. It is already known that runic numbers are used in a pentadic way like this. The picture shows numbers 0-9, and 10 should be like a T, which can be found in https://gangleri.nl/articles/59/rune-calendars/.

So we can add it like Roman numerals, the picture below shows some numbers. However, this method is annoying for big numbers, maybe because it was mainly designed for golden numbers for date in calendar. It would be better if there is any other scheme.

Punctuations

I would like to use the three from Tolkien. One dot means a space, three dots mean a sentence, and double three dots mean a paragraph. However, this seems that some of them are not in the Unicode.

Mark	Name	Code Point
᛫	RUNIC SINGLE PUNCTUATION	U+16EB
᛬	RUNIC MULTIPLE PUNCTUATION	U+16EC
᛭	RUNIC CROSS PUNCTUATION	U+16ED

It seems that there is no standard way to use it. In a picture from Wikipedia, the space is presented by two dots. Luckily, I am not the one trying to do so. A scheme was completed by rune school.

To be honest, I do like this scheme. It is clear, and follows some regulation, but the author introduced two dots horizontal “᛫᛫” to present a sentence, which is not my style, as I am getting custom to those from Tolkien.

So in this case, the space is the same, one dot, but two sentences will be separated by two vertical dots, and for emphasis, use the cross. For paragraphs, as paper is not so expensive now, we can just start a new line.

By the way, if you are interested, please visit the site above and check their blogs. The author made a runic spelling system to Modern English in futhorc. As they started working directly by IPA and ignored the letters, in which way it is possible to make it standard. Their work looks really amazing.

Example

Here is an example using this scheme. Here use a dot under the rune to show double (suggestions), which might not supported by your computer. In this case, you can write the rune twice.