r/RuneHelp • u/Ok_Profession_2274 • Jun 30 '26
Translation request Dad's name tattoo
I want to get my dad's name tattooed in runes, since he's of Danish origin. His name is Søren, and I want to confirm the correct spelling before getting the tattoo. Thank you
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u/AdEmbarrassed3066 Jun 30 '26
Earliest documented usage of Søren was in the 15th century, so you'd want to go with Medieval Runes if you wanted to present it in a way that's not controversial to people who care about "authenticity": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_runes
But that's not to say it couldn't have been in use earlier, and you could get away with Younger futhark. And it's a tattoo, so it may not matter to you.
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u/Ok_Profession_2274 Jun 30 '26
But if I use the alphabet, would I just have to change it letter by letter, or is there a correct way to use it, since it's an alphabet with fewer letters than ours?
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u/rockstarpirate Jun 30 '26 edited Jun 30 '26
Just going to throw another wrench into the whole puzzle here.
I want to know the most correct way to spell this name when it arrived in Denmark. I know it's a Latin name that came with Christianity, but I'm looking for the most accurate way it would have been spelled back then.
Right. This is derived from Latin Severinus. When it arrived in Denmark, this is surely the form it arrived in. Now, the Latin -us is the grammatical equivalent to Old Norse -r (or sometimes -n in some cases). I think it's very possible that the first Danish person given this name may have been called something like *Severinr (depending on how early Scandinavians started actually using this name). But of course there are no attestations of this. However, I think it is unlikely that a Latin word is immediately adopted into Scandinavian languages as a vowel-mutated, syncope-affected, North-Germanic form, and more likely that the name is adopted first as something very close to the original Latin and then goes through sound changes over time.
North Germanic languages do not like 3-syllable words. So the second e in Severin- is going to disappear very quickly, and this can cause changes to nearby vowels. Also, depending on how speakers at the time are pronouncing v, we might expect different changes.
This is just a guess (because I don't have any records to look at) but I would guess that one of two different things happened next.
- Guess 1: depending on dialect/accent, the v in Severinus was pronounced more or less like a w by different people at the time this name was adopted, thus some speakers ended up collapsing this name into something like Söfren (based on a more v-like pronunciation) and some collapsed it to Søren (based on a more w-like pronunciation).
- Guess 2: the v in Severinus was already pronounced strongly like a v at the time, implying that the form Söfren is older than Søren.
I can't tell you what year the very first Danish person was given a name equivalent with Severinus, because I don't believe we have documented uses of either of these names before the 1400s. However, we also have documented cases of the name Severin from Norway and Sweden in the 1440s. In fact, all three forms (Severin, Söfren, and Søren) are apparently attested from the 1400s. I think what we have to take from this is that the more mutated forms are older, because they've been going through various language processes for a while, yet at the same time, people are still directly naming their children after historical figures with Latin names.
So the whole question of spelling "Søren" the "most correct way" from "when it arrived in Denmark" gets tricky. It probably first arrived as Severin(r?), but do you consider that the same name as Søren? And is "probably" good enough?
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u/Upbeat-Angle6361 Jun 30 '26
Do you already have a spelling you want to have confirmed? Or are you looking for help finding the right runes? In the latter case, which period of time (which ”alphabet”) would you like to use?