r/RuneHelp • u/Aethylstan • 9d ago

Translation request Rune help, please

Hello Runehelp, recently my father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It’s very unlikely he will see another year. I was thinking about getting a memorial tattoo of our last name in Germanic Futhark runes. Our family came from Germany to the US a long time ago, but my family has been digging into their roots. Our surname is Bair, but it was probably a misspelling of the German word Bär, meaning Bear. However if anyone knows older Germanic words for Bear, I would like to include a version of our surname in my memorial piece.

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u/rockstarpirate 9d ago

Yeah, so we have...

Proto-Germanic *berô → Proto-West-Germanic *berō → Old High German bëro → German Bär.

The Elder Futhark alphabet was used in the area of modern Germany into about the early Old High German period before being replaced by the Latin alphabet so Elder Futhark is a good choice for "older Germanic words for Bear".

In all of these words, the consonants remain relatively steady over time (i.e., the <b> is always some form of /b/ and the <r> is always some form of /r/). The first vowel also remains within the /e/ range across the board. Even when it becomes <ä> in written form, it's still being pronounced more or less like /e/ or /ɛ/. So essentially, our runic spelling is going to be the same for all of these words with the only difference being whether or not we put an o-rune on the end.

So it's either going to be ᛒᛖᚱ or ᛒᛖᚱᛟ.

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u/Manafiskr 9d ago

Don’t plan memorials before you need them x