Ogham and Rune Transliterations: It Seems I'm Stumped On Things

[chronarchy]

I have a project I want to work on, but I'm having difficulty with certain letters. Specifically, I want to do something with people's initials, but I can't really do that until I have all the English letters figured out.

Since Old Irish (and Ogam) just doesn't have all these letters (you know, being Q-Celtic and all, plus decidedly not Latin), I'

Comments

[chronarchy]

Germans handle the W as a V because, I think, that's what "W" means to them, phonetically. :) But V is closer to F in terms of actual usage.

Ooh, just found this in Gordon's An Introduction to Old Norse: "v in the 12th century was a voiced bilabial fricative, like german u in quelle or Spanish b in saber; during the thirteenth century v became labio-dental, like English v, the same sound as Icelandic f medial and final. Hence a word like æve was often spelled æfi. In the combination hv the sound of v was voiceless, but in the 14th century hv became kv in some dialects."

Well, that's more than either of us ever wanted to know about that, isn't it? :)

For X, I thought about doing two runes (kenaz and suwilo are Thorsson's suggestion), but that's far more complicated than I wanted to go on this. Interestingly, Gordon suggests "G" might be a good option, as it could be used as an unvoiced ch (as in "loch") at times, too.

[chronarchy]

I put it as Uruz because according to Elmer Antonsen's A Concise Grammar of the Older Runic Inscriptions, he places Uruz phonetically as both /u/ and /u/ (with the long bar over the top of the second "/u/", which I can't figure out how to print on-screen). In Old and Middle English, "Y" was the tranliteration for that "/y/" sound (though it devolves into /i/ in Middle English, eventually), which is where I picked this up.

The best option, but not suited to what I'm doing, is to try and do a bindrune or more than one rune for it, like Isa/Uruz, I think.

Eihwaz might be a good choice, but so is Jera, really. I think a lot of it depends on whether it's a consonant or a vowel (Eihwaz or Uruz for vowel, Jera for consonant).

[chronarchy]

On further reflection, I think Eihwaz is the better place to put "Y". In answering sleepingwolf above, I found a passage in Gordon that suggests that the /i/ is more likely to be what was eventually transliterated as "y." Thanks!

[uberrod]

Typically Eiwhaz is the final y sound (trul-y) and Jera is the initial y sound (Y-ear).

I've always seen stuff relating Uruz to U or V. But you have way more linguistics backing up F/V than I could ever do.

[anivair]

I also like emancholl as X. You'll get people twitching about it either way, but I dig it.

I also think that keeping y in uillenn is easiest, only because if you line it up with uath you will confuse the hell out of the h and j association.

I usually drag p into other sounds like a B. It's a tricky one (tricky enough that people actually use peith for stuff) so maybe peith is an option as long as you're not doing any divination with it. If it's just a font, then that's fine. if you want discriminatory meaning out of peith you're pretty much diving into UPG land.

[chronarchy]

Yeah, I'm not thinking much about divination, so I'm sort of leaning toward the peith option for P. I keep thinking about Irish people calling "Patrick" "Batrick," and that just doesn't do it for me :)