Old Germanic writing. The Runic Alphabet

The bulk of the Old English material is written in the Latin alphabet. Certain modifications were used to denote some sounds. In the Old English variety of the Latin alphabet i and j were not distinguished, nor were u and v. The letters k, g, x, w were not used until many years later. A new letter was devised by puttina the stroke through d- , ð, [ð,ɵ]. The letter a was used either alone or as part of letter made up of a+e=æ. In the early Old English one can also find o+e=œ which was placed on e. All English writing was based on the phonetic principle: every letter=separate sound. This principle was not always observed. Some letters indicated 2 or more sounds.
Old Engl alphabet

a – [a]

æ-Ӕ – заглавная – asch [æsk] – [æ]

b – [b]

c-cen [ken]- [k’] - next to/before front vowels, [k] – in other cases

d-[d]

e-звук е

f-[f]/[v]

s – [s]/[z]

-thorn , ð,

These letters stand for voiced fricatives between vowels and between a vowel and a voiced consonant. Otherwise they indicate corresponding voiceless fricatives.

The other alphabet used is the runical, a special type of alphabet. It is a specifically Germanic alphabet which varied slightly from tribe to tribes. The number of runes (letters) varies from 16 or 24 to 28 or 33. They had magic value. In letters angular, straight lines are preferred. There are important semantic fields in the runic code. The 1^st part – the symbols for “cattle” and “property”, the 2^nd –trees. The 3^rd – Germanic deities, the 4^th – natural phenomena.

Дальше не по лекции. У меня больше ничего об этом не написано.

According to David Crystal what rune (OE run) means is debatable. There is a long standing tradition which attributes to it such senses as ‘whisper’, ‘mystery’, ‘secret’, suggesting that the symbols were originally used to magical or mystery rituals. Such associations were certainly present in the way the pagan Vikings (and possibly continental Germans) used to corresponding word, but there is no evidence that they were present in Old English. Current research suggests that the word run had been thoroughly assimilated in to Anglos-Saxon Christianity, and meant simply ‘sharing of knowledge and thoughts’. Any extension to the word of magic and superstitions is not part of the native tradition. Modern English word rune is not even a survival of the Old English word, but a later borrowing from Norse via Latin.

For the modern, magical sense of rune the English language is therefore indebted to the Scandinavian and not Anglo-Saxon tradition. In this sense which surfaced in the 19th century in a variety of esoteric publications, and which lives on the popular and fantastic imagination of the 20th century, perhaps most famously in the writing of John Ronald Tolkien.

There are less than thirty clear inscriptions in Old English, some containing only a single name.The two most famous examples both date from the 8th century, and present the Northumbrian dialect.

One of them is an inscription on a box called the “Franks Casket”. It was discovered in the early years of the 19th in France, and was presented to the British Museum by British archeologist, A.W Franks. The casket is a small box made of whale bone; the four sides are carved: there are pictures in the center and runic inscriptions around. The longest among them, in alliterative verse, tells the story of the whale bone, of which the Casket was made.

The Ruthwell Cross is a fifteen- feet tall cross inscribed and ornamented on all sides. The principal inscription has been reconstructed into a passage from an Old English poem, the dream of the Rood, which was also found in another version in a later manuscript.

Many runic inscriptions have been preserved on weapons, coins, amulets, tombstones, rings, various cross fragments.

Elder Futhark is thought to be the oldest version of the Runic alphabet, and was used in the parts of Europe which were home to Germanic peoples, including Scandinavia. Other versions probably developed from it. The names of the letters are shown in Common Germanic, the reconstructed ancestor of all Germanic languages.

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