/asatru/ - Asatru / Heathenry / Paganism

the different fuþarks tend to be for different purposes. the elder fuþark is most commonly used for esoteric purposes. the younger fuþark is not really relevant today but was the standard writing system of the viking period. they all lack sufficient phonetic coverage for flawless rendering of modern english, but the anglo-saxon fuþorc gets closer than the other two and requires fewer phonetic compromises. the armanen runes are pretty much useful only for esoteric purposes and have no premodern inscription corpus.

there is not an undisputed, established "system" for using runes as a writing system these days, nor is there a single accepted esoteric "system". you should begin by reading the wikipedia articles about the three fuþarks and read the surviving rune poems. from that point you will know where to go next.

Just learn elder futhark, it's the most versatile. Even the anglo-saxons reverted back to using elder futhark because the Futhorc was so fucked up and incomprehensible.

>>1794
>I was confused by the whole Elder Futhark, Younger Futhark, and the other runic alphabets listed there.

Why? They're different alphabets from different time periods that all evolved from a common root.

Think of their difference in being that between old italic vs. roman block capitals vs. something totally modern like the polish alphabet.

>which runic alphabet do you use/recommend?

for what exactly? magical purposes? I don't do that so I wouldn't know.
They're used to write the languages of the time periods and places they're from.

>Also do I need to learn a new language as well in order to write in runes (e.g. old norse)?

No, but bear in mind that you're going to be doing alot of phonetic approximation, even with elder futhark (which has a pretty wide grapheme range compared to younger). Spelling will also be different, especially with words containing -ng and -th- sounds.

On the topic of old norse, ON actually has a phoneme inventory that's significantly larger than it's native alphabet (younger futhark) can adequately handle…so learning ON and trying to write it in runes could prove to be even more difficult.

ᚦᛖ ᚠᛁᚱᛋᛏ ᚦᛁᛝ ᛄᚢ ᚾᛁᛞ ᛁᛋ ᚪ ᚱᚢᚾᛁᚳ ᚠᚪᚾᛏ ᚠᚩᚱ ᛄᚩᚢᚱ ᚳᚩᛗᛈᛄᚢᛏᛖᚱ᛬

http://junicode.sourceforge.net/
http://dev.bowdenweb.com/a/fonts/segoe/ui/symbols/segeo-ui-symbol.ttf

ᚦᛖᚾ ᛄᚢ ᚹᛁᛚ ᚾᛁᛞ ᚪ ᚱᚢᚾᛁᚳ ᚳᛁᛒᚩᚱᛞ ᛚᛖᛁᚪᚢᛏ᛬

http://thomaswebb.net/my-code/write-runes-on-your-computer/

ᚫᚠᛏᛖᚱ ᚦᚫᛏ ᚪᛚ ᛄᚢ ᚹᛁᛚ ᚾᛁᛞ ᛁᛋ ᛏᚢ ᛋᛖᛏᛖᛚ ᚪᚾ ᚻᚫᚹ ᛏᚢ ᚹᚱᚪᛁᛏ ᛗᚪᛞᛖᚱᚾ ᛖᛝᛚᛁᛋᚳ ᛄᚢᛋᛁᛝ ᚱᚢᚾᛋ ᛗᛖᛁᛞ ᚠᚩᚱ ᚻᚹᚩᛚᛁ ᛞᛁᚠᛖᚱᛖᚾᛏ ᚠᚩᚾᛖᛏᛁᚳ ᛋᛁᛋᛏᛖᛗᛋ᛫᛫᛫

ᚻᛁᚱ ᛁᛋ ᚹᚪᚾ ᚳᚱᚫᛈᛁ ᛈᚱᚩᛈᚩᛋᚪᛚ᛬

http://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/mer.htm

>>2448
I know all three of the historical futharks and i see many runes that i've never seen before.
What are all these runes? They can't be historical.

>>2459
some of those appear to be runestone variants (like the shit you'd see inna field if you were an archaeologist) of younger futhark. Others appear to be really rare variants of anglo-saxon runes.

>>2448
for what purpose? Junicode is fairly standard amoung medievalist and already exists.

>>1978
>anglo-saxon runes

Oh god why did you do this!? Lol, I'm used to elder futhark, so reading futhorc (especially the a-o symbols related to elder askr) is so hard…

ᛏᛖᛊᛏᛁᛜ ᚦᛁᛊ ᚾᚢ ᛚᚨᛇᛟᚢᛏ

>>2517
>some of those appear to be runestone variants (like the shit you'd see inna field if you were an archaeologist) of younger futhark. Others appear to be really rare variants of anglo-saxon runes.
Ah, okay.

>>2459

A lot of them are short-twig Younger Fuþark variants. I feel that they were almost certainly favored for being fast to handwrite, so they are important for a medievalist font like Junicode but irrelevant for what I am working on. I have some new ideas about the letterforms and will probably end up deleting all the short-twig glyphs to focus only on mainline Elder, Younger, and Anglo-Saxon runes.

>>2517

Nothing really works as a screen font for long passages – most fonts' runic support is sufficient only for short passages at large text sizes, which I see as a barrier to modern revival of the script. Junicode is the best of these, but below 12 or 14 pixels in height (i.e. 13-15 points) it becomes difficult to distinguish the runes quickly even with subpixel antialiasing.

Secondly, every font I've found has prioritized fidelity to the historical letterforms, which makes them ideal for Germanic philology but unsuitable for just typesetting text. Segoe UI Symbol is the closest I've found to what I want, but the three ansuz variants are still pretty hard to distinguish at 10 pixels, for example.

I think that computer rendering of runes could really benefit from a typeface with characteristics like Verdana – something with wide characters, exaggerated letterforms, and a runic equivalent to Verdana's large x-height, which I think is going to likely involve things like comparatively short legs on tiwaz, fehu, algiz, etc. to enlarge the identifying parts of the glyphs.

In that screenshot I was using a lot of lines with a slope of 0.5 to stretch the runes out to a wider width but I don't think it's really been successful, because the differentiating characteristics of the three ansuz variants are still getting buried at 10 pixels height. I do like the results from lots of big rounded forms in place of the zig-zags like you see on wunjo, berkanan, raiðo, etc., so I think I am probably going to lean heavily on that. I have been spending a lot of time staring at News Gothic, Clearview, and Akzidenz-Grotesk… as well as learning a lot about how to bend bezier curves to my will, which is about as difficult and frustrating as I expected.

>>2562
>barrier to revival
>size

I dunno, although size is a problem sure, I'd say runes have FAR more issues barring them from modern revival.
For instance: phoneme registers. Elder Futhark doesn't have enough lexemes to accurately model any modern germanic language's phoneme register.
Anglo-saxon is better off, but still has issues and can't render much of modern english (i.e. there is no zh sound in angle-sax, but it occurs frequently in mod. engl. See the suffix "-tion" which is pronounced "-zhun" rather than "-tee-on" as in other germansc speaks).
OP's pic especially shows this problem. Sure, I can understand the gist of what it means, but most properly it is render:
"ee-f ee-oh kahn ree-ahd thee-s ee-oh ahr-ey noht ah neeg-geyr" (which begs the additional question as to whether one should be using -ᛖᚱ or -ᛉ in ᚾᛁᚷᚷᛖᚱ due to the non-existance of -er in proto-germanic and the preference for -z, which morphed into -er in all but gothic.)

>but the three ansuz variants are still pretty hard to distinguish at 10 pixels, for example.

I assume you're referring to angle-sax ᚪ ᚫ ᚩ?
you aught to see my hand writing – those runes are just hard to distinguish PERIOD. ᚩ -> ᚠ morphing happens alot for me in writing.

>Nothing really works as a screen font for long passages

IIRC, this is true of ALL runes. Go take a look at codex runicus (iirc, it contains the scanian law) and compare the font size to something contemporary written in latin script like konungsbok. Runes in general aren't suited for much more than carving epitaths on stones, labelmaking or carving the occasional curse on a niᚦstang.
If you want to use them for more, you're going to be forced to take the codex runicus approach and make them bigger than latin letters.

Another very real barrier to revival is the hassle. I've been experimenting recently with writing some of my more…controversial…opinions in anglo-saxon runes. In order to accomplish this, I've had to:
>DL a runic font that complies with standard assignments for runic characters in UTF-8 unicode (junicode works here)
>download and install a keyboard layout (babelstone works here)
>draft all my pages with explicit UTF-8 character encoding
>find work arounds, as runic characters cannot be displayed in certain weights in certain browsers
>provide information to prospective readers as to where to find a suitable runic font.

…and this compares to simply using latin

>write page
>publish it

>>2574

Pretty much all medieval manuscripts are impenetrable to the modern eye. Look at a typical insular manuscript – it looks like a bunch of loopy bubbles. We have Latin typefaces that easily differentiate lowercase "l", capital "I", and numeral "1", so I am hardly convinced that there is no way to make ᚩ, ᚪ, and ᚪ distinguishable.

While it's apparent that none of the historical rune rows contains sufficient characters to handle the Modern English phonetic inventory, I am certain that the "Runic" block of Unicode does. I would argue that the only real challenge would be coming up with a sensible mapping, i.e. avoiding stupid shit like assigning ᚤ to [ə], which is a thing I have seen proposed. But why not ehwaz?

I agree that [ʒ] is likely to be a hard one to crack.

As far as displaying them to others easily, well, OS X ships with two fonts implementing the Runic block (Geneva and Apple Symbol, both of which are admittedly pretty bad), Windows has shipped with an outstanding one for years (Segoe UI Symbol), and every major Linux distribution has both the adequate Junicode and the atrocious FreeMono. The bar is set really low for basic entry to reading texts rendered in runic scripts. I think the barriers are entirely social, and making them pleasant and easy to read for modern eyes would certainly be a start.

>>2575

(Eihwaz, even. Ehwaz is taken, obviously)

>>2575
>Pretty much all medieval manuscripts are impenetrable to the modern eye

IMO, this is only true with your qualifier of "the modern eye".

Months ago, I wanted to be fancy and bought a calligraphic fountain pen. No one told me that caligraphic fountain pens can only make marking strokes in ONE direction – meaning, my modern handschrift was right out (as modern hand writing was designed for ball-nibbed fountain pens which can write omnidirectionally)

So, I learned the last handschrift that was written with single direction strokes – uncial. As such, old texts written in uncial are only hard for me because they're often in norman, latin or frankish…not because of the handschrift.

In this, I'd hazard that the issues of character distinction with runes are almost solely related to them simply being "foreign" to that ever present "modern eye".

>eihwaz as schwa
hmm, interdatsting. I'd say that would depend on which set you're using and which dialect of english.

Eihwaz in elder futhark sounds like futhorc aesc (iirc, anyway)…meaning it's not quite schwa, but it certainly works.

For angle-sax, I'd say use aesc for schwa (eihwaz has its own sound…the eo dipthong which is FAR from schwa), though, at least for american english.

hard J and soft G (as in japan or germany) present their own issues which modern german could inspire a solution to…however, even the german solution is troubling because we have no sh- sound. Is "shit" spelled as such, or should we use kaunan in place of halgiz?

speaking of shit, I must do this, so I'll continue ranting soon…

>>2578


ah, back again.

Anyway, here's how I transliterate:

Elder Futhark is too limited to represent anything other than proto germanic. IMO, it is useless for anything but divination or ANCIENT history.

Futhorc represents a good number of sounds in english, barring Soft C, ch-, sh-, hard j and soft g.

So here's how I'd go about it
>use futhorc for english
>sh = ᛋᛣ; reason- anglo-saxon uses sc for sh
>zh = ᛏᛋᛣ; reason- german declares "z" as a "ts" sound. this becomes "tsc" or "zc"…that is, modern zh. So "fusion" -> ᚠᚢᛏᛋᚳᚩᚾ or "futscon" -> fuzhon (more accurate would be to insert isas and make it fiutscon, but meh)
>j/g = ᛞᛋᛣ this is like german "dsch" in "dschengiskhan" -> gengiskahn (although ausspoken as "jengiskahn")
>schwa -> ᚫ; close but not quite.
>ch = ᛣ reasoning is historic: anglo saxon morphs c -> ch in sound based on stress. so "cheese" becomes "ᛣᛖᛖᛋᛖ", but because we speak english and know no word "ceese", it makes sense that it would be cheese. Alternatively, perhaps cx, as ᛉ is more gutteral in angle-sax, thus "c-phlgem-eese".


I can't think of anymore issues, but I'm also not thinking comprehensively right now…

>>2579
also, replace ᛣ with ᚳ in my examples…I'm used to futhark transliteration, where k = kaunan, not kalk.

>>2578

Japan and Germany start with the same phoneme (at least the way we talk around where I live). In IPA it's [dʒ]… so we would just need to settle on a [ʒ]. Likewise I would argue we need something for [ʃ].

>>2584


>[ʃ]

ᛋᚳ makes this sound in anglo saxon.
remember, A-S Kaunen makes the mod. engl. "ch" sound (normalised latin A-S would render it as the "c with a dot")
>[ʒ]

mystery to me

>[dʒ]

After some reasearch, I found inspiration as to how anglo-saxon would handle it:
On the Franks Casket, "jerusalem" is rendered "HIERUSALEM" in latin letters.
Considering how ᚻ in anglo saxon is not simply mod. engl. "H", but also IPA [h], [x], [ç] (the "phlem H" in "hannukah" that gets made fun of so much), I'd say that with anglo saxon runes, we could render [dʒ] as ᚻᛁ, based on what the potential sound is, and the historical precedent of the franks casket.

>>2586

I am more interested in establishing a new one-to-one mapping of the phonetic inventory.

>>2587
oh…ok
In this case

>[dʒ]

is also rendered as Ġ (more specifically, CĠ sometimes in words like bryċġ), which is a valid value for gifu (ᚷ)

leave it to jerusalem to throw me off on things…

>[ʒ]
doesn't occur in AS, so I'd just spell it "traditionally", as it's obviously a post-norman innovation. So
"caution" -> "ᛣᚪᚢᛏᛁᚩᚾ" (lit. "cau tee on", but oh well).

>>2607

Seeing it in the thumbnail, fehu definitely has to go, but i think the ᚪ / ᚫ / ᚩ are working

>>2608
Since your most likely audience is going to be native latin script readers, I'd strongly suggest you either straighten or invert kaun/cen. It has strong ambiguity with latin "h" and will probably trip alot of latin-readers up.

>>2625

That's a good point.

… but the wunjo stays :)

>>2626
the other characters are fine…that kaunen was just hitting my eyes like fuck.

what's really confusing me is:
what script is this supposted to be in this latest block?

you have aesc, ac and os (specifically AS runes) in tandem with Jera (a specifically EF rune). ᛋᚳᚪᛚᛚ ᚹᛖ ᚾᚩᛏ ᚢᛋᛖ "ᛄ" ᚱᚪᚦᛖᚱ ᚦᚪᚾ "ᛃ"?

also, do you have a working copy of this font? I'd like to DL it and try writing some long-texts in it to test its legibility vs. junicode.

>>2627

This typeface does not care about historical combinations; Junicode handles that just fine.

The plan is to be able to set text using the "Runic" block of Unicode in a legible way, prioritizing EF and AS and favoring whichever form of a particular fuþark I judge to be the most aesthetically pleasing and visually distinct for legibility.

So, for example, both U+16CA and U+16CB will probably end up being the exact same two-bend sowilo you see there, there will only be an EF jeran used for both U+16C3 and U+16C4, there will be only a single-bar hagalaz, short-twig runes will just render as long-branch, etc. At least that's the plan right now, I could end up changing my mind, but regardless I'll release the SFD source code under SIL OFL so anyone who disagrees can pick up from there.

>>2628

It's missing a ton of glyphs right now and it is literally completely unkerned. I'll probably get it to a point later this week that I can start making TTF releases.

>>2629
huh. interdasting. welp, hurry the hell up and get a release! I'm interested in writing/reading in this typeface.

>>2690
>but the Elder Futhark is very straightforward and probably easier to use than the others

I would disagree. Elder futhark is good for extremely short, unambiguous inscriptions that contain words with mostly pure vowels in them.
For long-form texts (i.e. articles, books, etc) with a rich, modern english vocabulary, elder futhark doesn't have anywhere near the sound inventory to render things unambiguously or legibly.

For example, your "bix nood" example, in a long-form text would be easy to read incorrectly if I were speed reading because "ᛟᛟ" like that doesn't make the modern english "oo" sound – ᛟ makes the "oh" sound, and two of them just indicates an archaic "long" vowel – that is, "long" as in stress-length, unlike modern spelling where it indicates vowel quality (i.e. your example is rendered "beeks nohwd" not "bijks nuud" like you thought it should sound).
This gets REALLY bad in words with sounds that didn't exist in common germanic – like mod. engl. "sh", "zh", "ch", "dzh", etc. And lets not even get into the limited sound inventory in expressing the differences in modern long/short A AE E and I. Elder just doesn't cut it at all here…

Anglo Saxon runes are 90% the same as elder futhark, but shift one or two values and adds maybe 3 characters in order to represent english-native sounds.

>>2713
lots of typos and broken conventions in my text too…

(Oh, yeah, the line spacing obviously needs significant work.)

>>2713
>>2714

Thanks for the feedback and the Windows screenshot. It looks like the problem areas on Cleartype are the same things I've noticed on AAT and Freetype, so fixing the hinting there should make things look more uniform on Windows as well.

I am pretty strongly committed to keeping the rounded letterforms even for the EF runes. After looking at the codex runicus, the places I am using rounded strokes are the same places that scribe used them, and I think they improve legibility. I will probably make a more traditional font after I am done working on this one, however, but that is a lower priority due to the existing coverage by Segoe and Junicode. I do plan to add arabic numerals, considering the unworkability of all the traditional runic methods for representing numbers, but latin letters would be a lot of work that I don't think would give much benefit. Existing grotesque fonts handle that much better than I could hope to do, at least at this point, and I would rather focus my limited skills and time on improving the status of runic fonts. People who need to set mixed texts of runic and latin characters should choose a suitable latin font to pair with it.

Oh man it is so great that Fontforge keeps crashing when I try to save my kerning data.

>>2877
>faux italics

I cringed a little.

Verbix.com is an amazing resource for runology. They have a bunch of runestone inscriptions, all properly transcribed with Unicode (…and Latin), and linked to a verb conjugation tool that shows runic output (…and Latin).

http://runes.verbix.com/index.html

http://www.verbix.com/webverbix/go.php?D1=83&H1=183&T1=wr%C3%AEtan

>>3409

ᛁ ᚨᚲᛏᚢᚨᛚᛚᛁ ᛞᛟᚹᚾᛟᛞᛖᛞ ᚦᛁᛋ ᛏᛟᛞᚨᛁ. ᛋᛏᛁᛚᛚ ᚹᛟᚱᚲᛁᛜ ᛟᚾ ᛚᛖᚱᚾᛁᛜ ᚺᛟᚹ ᛏᚢ ᛏᛖᛁᛈ ᚹᛁᚦ ᛁᛏ - ᚺᛟᚹ ᛏᚢ ᛏᚱᚨᚾᛋᛚᛖᛁᛏ ᛖᚾᚷᛚᛁᛋᚺ ᛋᛟᚹᚾᛞᛋ ᛏᚢ ᚾᛟᚱᛋᛖ ᚨᚾᛁᚹᚨᛁ. ᚷᛟᛁᚾᚷ ᛏᚢ ᛒᛖ ᛞᛁᚲᛁᛜ ᚹᛁᚦ ᛁᛏ ᚠᛟᚱ ᛋᚢᛗ ᛏᛖᛁᛗ ᛃᛖᛏ ᛏᚢ ᚷᛖᛏ ᚨ ᚠᛖᛖᛚ ᚠᛟᚱ ᛁᛏ.

>>4405

I am working on a proposal for transcribing Modern English using runes and welcome any feedback you might have.

https://github.com/raidh0/runic-computing-resources

>>4446
ᚻᚹᚪᛁᛚ ᚱᚪᛁᛏᛁᛝ ᛗᚪᛁ ᛚᚫᛋᛏ ᛈᚩᛋᛏ ᚪᛁ ᚹᛇᛉ ᛇᚾᚴᛋᛄᚢᚱ ᛇᚡ ᚺᚪᛟ ᛏᚢ ᛏᚱᚫᚾᛉᛚᛁᛏᛇᚱᛖᛁᛏ ᛖᚡᚱᛁᚦᛁᛝ. ᛋᛏᛁᛚᛚ ᚷᛁᛏᛏᛁᛝ ᛄᚢᛋᛏ ᛏᚢ ᚧᛇ ᚾᚢ ᛣᛁᛒᚩᚱᛞ ᚻᚣᚱ.

I really like the system you've come up with. I tried to do it best I could in the rest of the post. I was actually curious if anything like this were anywhere up on the internet and I'm really happy to find it. I can't think of any criticism for it, because it seems pretty dead on.
Do you happen to know by chance if there's anything like a standardized system similar to this for Norse? Been working on that just getting the sounds as close as I can because I haven't found any type of standardization for it or anything.

>>4447
>Do you happen to know by chance if there's anything like a standardized system similar to this for Norse?

Old Norse? That would be the Younger Futhark. If you are talking about Modern Norwegian, I don't know.

>>4448
Yeah, Old Norse. From what I understand it used to all be just written according to whoever was writing felt it ought to be spelled, but I was looking around to see if there were any sort of standardization for any of it, but I haven't come across any such thing yet.

>>4451

Yeah, that was before standardized spelling was a thing. Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from the same time period also show significant regional spelling variation, and even variation within individual manuscripts. So the main point is that it's not really a big deal.

The idea of standardized spelling is a pretty modern concept, so I think it is a good idea for Modern English, but I have never had too much trouble with people writing it according to other systems. For anyone with a moderate awareness of Germanic phonology, it's difficult to get it so wrong that it ends up being unreadable.