![]() ![]() ![]() Ash, while it retained its Runic name, was basically just constructed from Latin letters to represent a non-Latin sound. Thorn and wynn were just plucked from the fuþorc and dropped into the alphabet there's little reason not to do the same with v and z. In their place, to make up for the deficiency in single voiced consonants, this alphabet does with the Anglo-Saxons themselves once did with the letters thorn, wynn, and ash-that is to say, shamelessly borrow glyphs from an alphabet that does have them. In order to make up for this, the excess vowel runes (geoh, ior, and ear) as well as the redundant double-consonants (eolx, kealk, and stan) have been dropped. There are too many vowels (mainly diphthongs, like io, eo, and ea, that have long since collapsed into simple vowels in ModE) and not enough consonants (a single symbol in the OE fuþorc serves for each of the labiodental, dental, and alveolar fricatives-there are runes for f, s, and þ, but not for v, z, and ð). Now, as great as the standard Anglo-Saxon fuþorc is for writing Anglo-Saxon, it's not quite up to snuff for writing Modern English. It was at this point, upon finally arriving at a workable phonetic writing system, that it was decided that runes would simply look better than Latin letters. ![]() That only left x to represent /ŋ/, which may be kind of arbitrary, but no more so than the Romans taking the Greeks' voiceless aspirated velar plosive and making it a /ks/ double consonant. That's why all the interrogative pronouns that start with "wh" or "hw" in Germanic languages begin with a "qu" in Italic languages. Using q for the voiceless bilabial approximate isn't all that far-fetched either-the /kw/ sound we're so used to seeing "qu" represent, after all, is an Indo-European sound that became /ʍ/ in the Germanic languages due to Grimm's Law. That left œ for the short u sound, not much of a stretch given that this symbol represents a similar-sounding (but rounded) vowel in French (the same vowel written by umlat o in several Germanic Languages). Y, given the frequency that it shows up in place of other vowels (especially in Middle English), meant that it wouldn't be too jarring to see that letter used for the schwa. The remaining letters were q, x, y, and œ (wynn having already been consciously left off the list, since it looks too much like p). That only left the problem of where to assign the mid unrounded central vowel (short u), the voiceless bilabial approximant (wh), the velar nasal (ng), and the schwa. Using c and j for the post-alveolar fricatives was also kind of obvious, given their close relation to palatal affricates. Yogh likewise very often stood for the palatal approximate in Middle English. Regarding the choice of which values to assign which letters, some (such as thorn and eth representing the interdental fricatives, and using ash for short a), were obvious, as those are the sounds they stood for in Old English. Obviously, the dialect of the writer can result in a considerable degree of spelling variation, particularly where vowels are concerned. The "alpha version" of the "Modern English Phonetic Alphabet" looked like this: Every letter from all the past incarnations of English, except the runic letter wynn, was represented in this system. ![]() This alphabet began with an attempt to create a phonetic system using only Latin, Old English, and Middle English letters. ![]()
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