ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ ᚠᚩᚩ ᛗᚩᛞᛟᚾ ᚩᛋᛏᚱᛖᛁᛚᛁᛖᚾ ᛁᛝᚸᛚᛁᛋᚳ - Futhorc for Modern Australian English


This is a cross-post from my Cohost blog. Cohost is shutting down at the end of the year, and going into read only mode on october :'[ so I am gonna be transferring across some posts I like. And I really wanted to my work with Futhorc about! - Also sorry if this was the wrong category. Technically this IS writing cos it is about writing a language- but it is more academic so maybe the uni category? But this is done independent of my schools- and there is no general "Hobby" category ToT

ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚩ ᚱ ᚳ ᚷ ᚹ ᚻ ᚾ ᛁ ᛄ ᛇ ᛈ ᛉ ᛋ ᛏ ᛒ ᛖ ᛗ ᛚ ᛝ ᛞ ᛟ ᚪ ᚫ ᛠ ᚣ ᛣ ᚸ 
Okay! So the first thing I wanna share is a lil personal project I have worked on for modernising the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc for Modern English (and in particular Aussie English). Why would I do this? Cos nerd, and cos heathen, so what more of a need do you need?

So! The Futhorc has 30 runes total! The problem with the Roman Alphabet for English is that it just doesn't have enough vowels to write all the vowels the language has- sure this has a unifying effect where frozen unspecific spellings are more readable for more people who have an agreed spelling but not an agreed pronunciation! But- I highly doubt Futhorc will gain that sort of ground, and if it does gain ground it'll be among heathens and nerds in general. Because this is highly personal then, there is not a single right way to use the runes for your speech, so feel free to use this system, feel free to ignore it, feel free to change it up for yourself! Anything!

Anyway! Futhorc is an alphabet, which broadly means a grapheme can represent either consonants or vowels (as opposed to abjads, whose graphemes broadly only represent consonants). So we are gonna have runes (or if we wanna use the native English word: roun) that represent consonants, and those that represent vowels. Consonants then and now are vv easy! The only big issue is that none of the rouns represent voiced fricatives like /v/, /z/, or /ð/. But that is fine! Outside of fan/van and assure/azure and there are no minimal pairs in English that I can call to mind! So the rouns that represent /f/, /s/, /θ/ can also represent their voiced counterparts. HOWEVER! A lot of germanic languages in their native scripts underdifferentiate their voiced fricatives. I remember learning Gothic before getting into linguistics and getting confounded by this fact =_= There is one consonant that rouns cannot write using monographs, and that is /ʃ~ʒ/! But I have an idea for that! Ralph W. V. Elliott's "The Runic Script" in "The World's Writing Systems" (1996) gives us a good summary of all the rouns, and their consonants! Which can all be summarised as the first table!

Now, the choice of using ᛋᚳ for /ʃ~ʒ/ is inspired by historical use of rouns for this sound, and also it does make sense! ᚳ represents a consonant cluster, using ᛋ as a sort of determiner tells us we are trying to represent the ᛋ-like sound of ᚳ!

Vowels is where it gets tricky- and this can be where different speakers will write things differently. So here I will base it off my own! The vowels in my own speech sound like (vowels are hard man, so the qualities mightn't be exact):

/i:/ - feet
/ɪ/ - fit
/ɛ/ - end
/ɛ̃/ - and
/œ(:)/ - word
/a(:)/ - cat
/ə~ɑ/ - cut
/ɑ:/ - bath
/ɞ~ɒ/ - cot
/ɔ(:)/ - caught
/ʊ/ - book
/ʉ:/ goose
/iə/ - here
/ɛi/ - ray
/œʉ/ - oat
/aʉ/ - out
/ɑi/ - eye
/ɔi/ - boy
/ʉə/ - tour

Where I make a difference between vowel length, it is where it sounds quite different to me. /ɑ:/ and /ɑ/ in bath and buff sound more different to me than does /ɛ:/ and /ɛ/ in thread and trek. Maybe that is arbitrary, but from the point of view of a writer, it makes sense to not make distinctions between sounds that are not significantly different, be it in terms of actual phonemic differences, or technical phonetic differences. But again, this is a personal choice, rouns are a personal thing, so again it is up the use in the end!

We have rather easy correlations to make! ᛁ for /ɪ/, ᛇ for /i:/, ᛖ for /ɛ(:)/, ᛟ for/œ(:)/, ᚩ for /ɔ(:)/, and ᚢ for /ʊ/! ᚫ fits closest modern English /a/, and so this pushes ᚪ back to /ə~ɑ/! For the other long vowels, we can just double our rouns! ᚢᚢ for /ʉ:/ and ᚪᚪ /ɑ:/! That marks off most of our vowels except for /ɞ~ɒ/- which is tricky! To be honest, as writing this ᚩ feels a better fit! As a lot of instances /ɔ(:)/ in my speech feels long (tall, thought, brought, more, etc.), compared to /ɞ~ɒ/ (boss, toss, cross, moss, etc.). So mayhaps ᚩ for /ɞ~ɒ/ and ᚩᚩ for /ɔ(:)/!

The last vowel we need to address but is /ɛ̃/. Most of the time, it is fine to just write this vowel the same as /ɛ/. But there are a few key minimal pairs I find it useful for writing. These minimal pairs being and/end, and man/men. When handwriting, I have taken to just using a lil dot under ᛖ to show it is nasal! But that character can't be written on computer- so maybe a diagraph like ᛖᚾ can be used for the nasal vowel- so and/end > ᛖᚾᚾᛞ/ᛖᚾᛞ and man/men ᛗᛖᚾᚾ/ᛗᛖᚾ. Ofc this can result in ambiguities like "eh" ᛖᚾ and "an" ᛖᚾ, but this exists only when writing on computer and not handwriting. And I think context can help us out here!

The dipthongs then follow pretty naturally from all of this! We can summarise all of the vowel rouns mono and digraphs in the third table <3 (ignore the lines, and the misplaced nasal sign, my word processor was mean to me ToT) We are left with 2 rouns then that do not have a use in modern English, or at least my own English, ᛠ and ᚣ. But, these sounds do exist within heathen words like wyrd and hyge!

But other than that! I think this is pretty neat! I have been doing a lot of personal writings using this orthography! And it works really well! I hope y'all's found this neat, and if there is any comments or suggestions, feel free to let me know! ᛖᚾᚾᛞ ᛋᛟᚢ ᛚᛖᛏ ᛗᛇ ᛋᛖᛁ ᚦᛖᛁᛝᛣ ᛄᚢᚢ ᚠᚩᚩ ᚱᛇᛞᛁᛝ ᛖᚾᚾᛞ ᚪᛁ ᚻᛟᚢᛈ ᛄᚩᛚᛋ ᚻᚫᚠ ᛖᚾ ᚪᛗᛖᛁᛋᛁᛝ ᛞᛖᛁ᛫


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