Aight! So! Futhark is pretty fekking cool! A pretty script! It had a tonne of different varieties from the various Scandinavian futharks to the continental futharks to the Anglo-Saxon furthark! Being both a linguistics student and a follower of Fyrnsida, I thought what if I could modernise the Anglo-Saxon futhark to fit my own Aussie English!!! If you don't wanna read the whole thing I have put a summary at the end of this post that you can jump down to!
SO! FIRSTLY! WHICH ANGLO-SAXON FUTHARK (or as more aptly Futhorc) SHALL I USE? There are two complete sets that we know of! These are the Thames scramasax which was a short inscription on a sword, and the Vienna Codex. While graphematically the same, they have a few graphemic/visual differences!
[Elliot, Ralph W. V. 1996. "The Runic Script." In The World's Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, 335-339. New York: Oxford University Press.]
I am gonna go with the Vienna Codex here just cos that is the one that the computers use so :P sorry Beagnoth- anyway! Next step was to get the phonemic transcriptions of these :D [sobs] This book gives a good overview of the readings of each of these runes, but there are some abiguities with ᚳ, and the exact qualities of some of the vowels. So my thinking is to take ᛁ/ᛇ, ᛖ, ᚪ, ᚩ, and ᚢ as the basic 5 vowel system, and then have ᛟ as /œ~ø/, ᚫ as /æ/, and have ᛠ and ᚣ be /æa/ and /y/ respectively! ᚳ I am gonna use solely as /k/, and recreate the /tʃ/ through a digraph later! It should also be noted that ᚠ /f/, ᚦ /θ/, and ᛋ /s/ are voiced medially, and that ᚷ /g/ is lenited non-initially. I quite like these so I am gonna keep that!
NOW! NEXT ORDER BUSINESS! ORTHOGRAPHY! HOW IS THIS GONNA FIT ONTO MY ENGLISH? THE MOST ANNOYING PART IS GONNA BE VOWELS! Australian English vowels are more than the ones that the Futhorc can write. So we gotta do some expanding and use some diagraphs- so I have settled on:
/æ:/ BAD - ᚫ (not gonna double this one as /æ/ and /æ:/ are saliently different to me but if anyone wants to use this they can double it if they want!)
/e:/ SQUARE - ᛖ (again, vowel length with here is not something I can hear really well?)
/ɜ:/ NURSE - ᛟ (closest modern vowel we have to /œ~ø/)
/ə/ ABOUT - ᛠ (this is just- a weird sound we, or at least I, don't use. I think it would be funky to be our schwa but! I know this is arbitrary, but I wanna try to use all of runes here)
/i:/ FLEECE - ᛇ (this was used as a variant of ᛁ, and also represents a few consonants which doesnt exist in my variety today, so I am just using it for /i:/ out of a want to use all the runes)
/ʉ:/ GOOSE - ᚢᚢ (I know these are different vowel qualities but tbh, it isn't immediately apparent to me that they are different lest i really listen to it? So personal choice to just use this digraph here)
It was pretty easy to assign vowels to runes! All bar ᚣ, whose /y/ sound is just... not something we have anymore? But! I have an idea for it with consonant digraphs!! So let's dive into the consonants!
/v/ VALUE - ᚠᚻ (this digraph I am gonna use initially, I am gonna use ᚠ in non-initial positions for /v/)
/ð/ THIS - ᚦᚻ (same as with /v/)
/z/ ZOO - ᛋᚻ (same as with /v/)
/ʒ/ VISION - ᛋᚣ (I cannot think of any words outside of vision where this sound comes up, so it'll be safe to have it homographic with /ʃ/)
/x/ MURDOCH - my /k/ and /g/ tends to lenite at the end of words, or in fast or stressed speech non-finally - ᚳᚻ/ᚷᚻ non-finally, and ᚷ finally
So! TL:DR we have come to:
Next thing I wanna work on is making these runes more pen on paper writing friendly. The angularity of the runes was due to the materials into which they were typically carved into, and in quick writing can be a bit awkward for writing. So that is gonna me my next goal. Again! The runes were always used with degrees of variability, to match the speech of their writers. They were never standardised, and this here is not an attempt to standardised them here. This is just a personal project that others are more than free to use and modify as they wish! I will follow this up later when I replace my pen that died last night with possible handwritten styles for the runes.
