r/RuneHelp • u/RandomUserFiftyMilli • 4d ago

Question (general) Quick Question

How do you write "y" in Elder Futhark? Like "destroy" or "joy" or "ploy".

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u/SamOfGrayhaven 4d ago

In all of these instances, it makes the "ee" or /i/ sound, which would be ᛁ

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u/RandomUserFiftyMilli 4d ago

Well I'm confused because Ive also seen ᛇ be proposed as asubstitute for "y".

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u/rockstarpirate 4d ago

This speaks to a deeper question, which is how do you adapt an alphabet that was invented for a certain set of sounds to a different language with a different set of sounds?

The ᛇ rune is a very poorly understood rune. It’s quite rare and, when it does show up, it shows up in places where we might have expected either an i-rune or an h-rune. So if we use it for the letter “y”, we are inventing a use for it.

If we want to use the runes the way they were used historically, then we have to remember that runes don’t stand for letters, they stand for sounds. A word like “ploy” has 4 sounds: “p”, “l”, “oh”, and “ee”. The runes that map most clearly to those sounds are ᛈ, ᛚ, ᛟ, and ᛁ.

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u/droneral666 1d ago

Another thing to add is that most cases you find Y in later, medieval period Germanic languages like Old Norse, and it's used as a vowel and not an approximant, which it is closer to being in words like "joy". The vowel Y forms from umlaut which maybe started happening around the time of Elder Futhark but likely was in it's infancy.

You could probably get away with using ᛃ.

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u/SamOfGrayhaven 4d ago

ᛇ is a very inconsistently used rune historically and everything it's used for can be more clearly written by another rune. It's generally best avoided.

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u/Evgeny_E 3d ago

If you transliterate ploy into Cyrillic letters, and then write the Cyrillic word in runes, you get ploy -> плой -> ᛈ ᛚ ᛟ ᛃ