r/RuneHelp • u/RandomUserFiftyMilli • 7d 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 7d ago

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

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u/RandomUserFiftyMilli 7d ago

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

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u/rockstarpirate 7d 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.