Modern English Alphabet with Old English Runes

modern english alphabet with old english runes

Modern ENli[ @lfabet wiT Old ENli[ rUnz

I wanted to see if I could match up the runes used in Old English with the modern English language. It wasn’t that hard. Most of the consonants are the same. There is not a 100% true “runic” alphabet, so some runes were used for multiple sounds. Some sounds, especially certain vowels or diphthongs, no longer exist in English. The image below shows you what I came up with. I ended up making a computer font. If you don’t have the ttf file, it just prints normal English. If you want to use it, here is the file. The letters look pretty small. Use like 30pt font.

TTF file

I have to explain some of the choices I made. First, this is a letter for letter change. There are 26 letters, and you can just replace each Latin letter with a runic letter. Second, I had to make up some runes or repurpose them to get the full alphabet.

The J sound as in “just” did not exist in Old English. There are two noted G runes, one I kept, the other I am using for J. This second “G” rune (gyfu) was used as G, Y, or the guttural G (listen to the Dutch word “gaan” for an example).
V used the same rune as F, as it is just voiced F. I took the F rune and modified it to make a unique V.
Same for Z. It just used S, so I made my own Z.
Q uses the rune that represents the “KW” sound.
X uses the rune that represents the “KS” sound.
All the capitol letters are identical to the lower case with a few exceptions.
I also made the space into a dash. I think it’s easier to read. If you want a real space, hit tilde.

There are 4 “additional” runes that I kept for historical interest.

Ash, the “a” sound as in “bat” or “cat”. This is tied to the @ symbol.
Ing, the nasal “ng” sound as in “king”. This is tied the capital N.
Stan, the “st” sound as in the “stone”. This is tied to capital S.
Thorn, the “th” sound as in “thick” or “that”. This is tied to capital T.

Note that the runic alphabet used thorn for voiced and unvoiced “th”. The letter eth came later, was based on the Latin D, and used inconsistently.

Then I decided to go further and add letters for a new spelling system. Similar to the Shavian alphabet, I wanted to create a phonetic alphabet. I think it is useless because all dialects of English pronounce words, and especially vowels, differently. Thus a word would be spelled differently depending on where one grew up. This is was just an attempt for my personal entertainment. I assume it could represent all American pronunciations. Here are the additions and the things I left out due to laziness.

Capital vowels have a macron to represent the long vowel, while lower case would represent the short vowel. Ash is now a useful letter.

a - /ɑ/ & /ɔ/ [caught, thought, watch], A - /eɪ/ [ate]
ash - /æ/ [at]
e - /ɛ/ [met], E -/i:/ [meet]
i - /ɪ/ [bit], I - /aɪ/ [bite]
o - /ʊ/ [good], O - /oʊ/ [toad]
u - /ʌ/ [but], U - /u:/ [boot]
C as we know it is dead. K is hard C, S is soft C. Now, C represents the “ch” sound, /ʧ/.
Sh, /ʃ/, as in “shut” and Zh, /ʒ/, like the s sound in “measure”, have their own letters. I stole the “ih” rune, which is a sound no longer in English, for /ʃ/, and modified it for /ʒ/. /ʃ/ is tied to [ /ʒ/ is tied to ].

As before, I didn’t separate thorn. It represents /θ/ and /ð/.
/aʊ/ always spell as “ow” eg out = owt
/ɔɪ/ always spell as “oy” eg oil = oyl
Schwa /ə/ is too hard to represent. Just use the standard vowel in that word.

That’s pretty much it. I never made a font before, but it wasn't very difficult. Maybe to make a GOOD font, it's difficult. Tell me what you think.

try it yourself today

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Updated 11/20/22