NEO-NORSE

I'm creating a modernized version of the Old Norse language. I want a language that has the same flavour as the Old Norse language, while also being very logical. I'm not saying that the Old Norse language was particularly illogical or difficult. I think most languages could do with less rules and less exceptions to the rules. I chose Old Norse, apart from the flavour, because it's an ancestor to current modern languages. Speakers of the daughter languages (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, German, Dutch, English) will have less trouble learning this language. In this post I'll only show you the runes, the letters that make up the alphabet for the language. In future posts I'll show you the actual language.

RUNES

Like Old Norse, my language needs to have runes. I wanted roughly 1 sound per rune, so I could not stick with any of the existing rune sets. Old Norse used only about 16 runes (the Younger Futhark), which isn't nearly enough to cover all of the sounds. Therefore I used the Anglo-Saxon runes (the Futhorc) as a basis, which contains the same runes as the Younger Futhark, but with additional characters. In the end I only had to add 3 new characters, coming to a total of 30 runes.

The table shows all of the runes, transcription characters, and IPA characters. Transcription is basically writing foreign words using familiar letters. You also use these letters when using the font I created to write these runes on your computer. You can download the font from THIS PAGE. The IPA symbols represent sounds, so that you know how to pronounce the letters. You can read about or listen to the pronunciation of the IPA symbols on THE WIKIPEDIA PAGE about it. This table does not really say much about the length of the sounds. I did want the writing system to show vowel length. Therefore I decided that short vowels should be written with 1 (vowel) rune, and long vowels with 2 runes. As an exercise, try to speak the name of my blog!

For the o rune I inverted the a (áss) rune, as the sounds are similar, and in the Futhorc I think three versions of the a rune exist, some associated with the o sound. The inversion was to make the a and o runes more dissimilar. For the ö rune I added a diagonal stroke to the ó (ódhal) rune to make it similar to the IPA symbol 'o with stroke', a letter used in parts of Scandinavia for that sound. Finally, the dh sound was originally associated with the th (thurs) rune, so I made a symbol similar to that rune. There's also similarity between the new rune and the eth character, which is commonly used to represent the dh sound.

I wanted to add that the inclusion of the z rune may not seem entirely logical, as the sound is absent in Old Norse. But if you want to use this script to write words of another language, it is nice to have all of the common sounds included. I can now, for example, write the name 'Zaluzar' using these runes:

 

I you have any remarks, please add a comment below.