Below is a table of letters and their runic counterparts, showing how all this can be resolved: Since we have *isa and *ehwaz for English i and e, *eihwaz remains unemplyed. Second, not all of the runes have obvious counterparts in Roman letters, for instance the *eihwaz rune denoted a phoneme with the sound value between and. First, there are 26 Roman letters in the English alphabet and only 24 runes in the Elder Futhark. May be they would even invent something more logical than using as many as three variants for one and the same sound as in ‘ gin’, ‘ joy’, and ‘e dge’.Įven though keeping the English orthography eliminates the most of the problems, some still remain. Not necessarily combining s and h for as in ‘ shame’ or c and h for as in ‘ child’. Should they have to, they would invent a way to do so.

However, it is also true that they did not have to transcribe words containing sounds like. It is true that ancient rune carvers did not use it. So the solution is to keep modern English spelling. If we try to use the Elder Futhark runes phonetically, that is substituting runes for the sounds we hear, the way runes were supposed to be used, we will fail, because there are not enough runes for all the English sounds.

It also did not have some sounds that do exist in English: for instance English has the sounds, whereas Proto-Norse did not have them. It had sounds that do not exist in English. The Phonological system (sound system) of the Proto-Norse language was not the same as in modern English. They are transcribed with letters or combinations of letters used for other sounds as in ch for and sh for. Several sounds (have a look at the IPA chart of English) do not have letters of their own. Roman letters used to transcribe the English language today do not constitute an ideal alphabet. The Elder Futhark runic alphabet was such an ideal system: there are as many Elder Futhark runes as there were sounds in the Proto-Norse language, for which they were developed. The ideal alphabet has a separate symbol (letter or rune) for each sound the language has. Now if we are to spell it in the Elder Futhark runes, we have to look deeper into what spelling is and have a look at the following facts: You may want to have inked in runes the name of a beloved one, your own name, or a name of a deceased person who was important in your life. Many runic tattoo designs include a name. Perhaps you wouldn’t like to be in such a situation with your runic inscription, would you? The name is well known in India because of Queen Victoria, so the person who developed the tattoo design probably wasn’t a native Hindi speaker and even did not know the language well.

The tattoo read Vihctoria instead of Victoria with additional h. David Beckham inked his wife’s name on his left forearm in Hindi but misspelt it. Online translation tools may play a trick on you: a woman who wanted to have “I love David” in Hebrew on her back, later realized the actual tattoo said “Babylon is the world’s leading dictionary and translation software”. Tattooed inscriptions in foreign languages or written in unusual characters may well be a source of trouble, especially if you don’t know well the language or the writing system. If you are about to have a Norse or Viking tattoo, I bet you want to include some Nordic runes into it. Developing a great design for a tattoo is critical in case you seriously plan to get inked.

Elder futhark rune tattoos