Comments | linguaphiles: Old English

zireael07 in linguaphiles

Old English

Oct 27, 2011 14:14

My gut tells me the Old English (Anglo-Saxon) letters and the Old Norse, and therefore modern Scandinavian letters are related. I'm talking mostly about wynn, ash, ethel (i.e. the letters that are now obsolete ( Read more... )

old english, germanic, writing, writing systems

Comments 11

mothwing October 27 2011, 12:26:05 UTC

Oh, on the topic of runes (which I think will come up) - were Tolkien's runes based on Old English runic alphabet?
They were AFAIK.

muckefuck October 27 2011, 14:29:46 UTC

There's only so many ways to carve letter shapes into wooden boards. Are there really more similarities between the Cirth and the Futhork than between the Cirth and the Old Turkic alphabet?

mothwing October 29 2011, 18:37:22 UTC

I'm only going by what the annotations in my LOTR edition told me, but they say that Cirth was based on Anglo Saxon Futhark (don't have the book here, but Wiki seems to agree).

But thanks a lot for pointing me towards that alphabet, it's really quite similar!

teacup_werewolf October 27 2011, 13:23:36 UTC

The anglo-saxon alphabet is probably the younger futhark. The updated cousin of the elder futhark. Tolkien based the runes off of the younger futhark than the elder but I might be wrong.

lectrix_lecti October 27 2011, 15:24:41 UTC

The Anglo-Saxon futhorc and the younger futhark developed about the same time-ish, but the younger futhark has only 16 runes while the futhorc has 24 (yep, had to google the exact number...). I seem to recall Tolkien used the futhorc as a starting point for his runes, but he probably nicked from all the runic alphabets.

teacup_werewolf October 27 2011, 18:24:32 UTC

If I remember correctly didn't the Elder Futhark had 18 runes?

brujaoscura October 28 2011, 01:57:08 UTC

24, three sets of 8 calle Aetts

lectrix_lecti October 27 2011, 15:15:12 UTC

Wynn and thorn come straight outta the futhorc, the Anglo-Saxon version of the runic alphabets. The Old Norse version of the runic alphabets is the younger futhark (Proto-Norse used the older futhark). I.e. the exact relationship is that some Old English letters have the same origin as Old Norse runes.

As for modern Scandinavian letters: æ was ash in the Old English alphabet. Ø may have come from Anglo-Saxon as well. Å was constructed from aa.

zireael07 November 6 2011, 13:26:56 UTC

Thank you! That explains the relationship! Is there anything else that could be added?

lectrix_lecti November 9 2011, 14:30:01 UTC

I didn't mention ä or ö because I know very little about Swedish, so there's something to dig up there, I suppose.

Forgot to mention that å is a very recent invention, 1800-something if my memory doesn't fail me.

Sorry for replying to an old post korvsupo August 25 2015, 15:17:46 UTC

I'll add some more random info in case anyone sees this in the future ( ... )