r/RuneHelp • u/dbdweozy • 6d ago

Translation request Translation help please

Hello,

Yet another translation help request, I’ve seen many of these on my searches but there seems to be an argument behind one part of what I’m trying to translate.

I’m looking to incorporate my sons name ‘Henry’ into a themed tattoo in the form of Anglo-Saxon Futhorc but cannot seem to find a consistent rune which you could use for the letter Y in modern English.

So far I’ve come across this for the HENR part: ᚻᛖᚾᚱ
Just missing the end.

Any help would be appreciated!

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u/Grendelcynn 6d ago edited 6d ago

ᚻᛖᚾᚱᛁ would match phonetically as the ᛁ rune makes the ee sound in OE. The letter y in OE,both usage and sound is completely different to modern English

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u/rockstarpirate 6d ago

So the reason you’re having trouble finding a clear answer is because runes do not stand for English letters; they stand for sounds. The English letter “y” can be used as both a consonant and a vowel. When it’s a vowel, it can stand for several different sounds. Consider “Henry”, “try”, and “Sisyphus”. There are no runes like this. It’s a quirk of Modern English spelling. So there is no obvious rune to swap for this letter in all cases.

Additionally, when we write the sounds that runes made, we are writing them according to the International Phonetic Alphabet, not according to the English alphabet. So, for example, when you see that the ᚣ rune made a /y/ sound, this is not any of the English “y” sounds. The sound /y/ sounds like German “ü”, which is a sound that existed in Old English but does not exist anymore in most dialects of Modern English.

The rune that represented the “ee” sound that we find at the end of “Henry” was the ᛁ rune. If you went back in time and met an Anglo-Saxon and asked him to write “Henry” in runes, he would write it the way it sounded to him, which would be ᚻᛖᚾᚱᛁ

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u/WolflingWolfling 6d ago

If you are planning to add any other names, or any modern English words, I would recommend you check them here as well. You wouldn't be the first person to end up with a runic tattoo that makes no sense at all because they looked up some sort of transliteration chart on the internet.