Runes and the Gothic alphabet

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Hi, I'm Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford. And in this video, what I want to talk about are some thoughts that I've had about the alphabet used for the Gothic language, the oldest Germanic language in which we have records in writing that are very long. and the relationship of that alphabet to the runic alphabet, the first alphabet or kind of related cluster of alphabets that we know of being used for Germanic languages. What I have are first of all uh what I think are some pretty responsible uh not huge jump uh thoughts. uh something that occurred to me that I think is is potentially pretty right. And then after uh break, I'm going to have I'm going to put on what I like to call speculation hat a little bit more. I'm going to talk about some uh thoughts that are, you know, maybe 10 steps down the road of speculation. I'm labeling them as speculation. I'm not saying that they are right and you have to for sure accept them. I just wonder about them.

[00:01:21]Oh yeah.

[00:01:40]So, first of all, without putting on speculation hat just too much just yet, I wonder if what we're looking at in the Gothic alphabet is something that is meant to please two audiences.

[00:01:59]And one of those audiences is people who already know runes. Because what is the natural target person that you're going to be teaching a new alphabet for writing your language in when there's already an alphabet that exists to write it? It's somebody who already knows that alphabet that exists to write it.

[00:02:19]So goths are using runes. And I think that that's demonstrable. We don't have a ton of runa inscriptions that are for sure gothic. I mean, there's the Petro Rosson neck ring. There's the Lani spindle horal. There's the cobalt spearhead.

[00:02:39]There's uh there's a few little things like this, but there's not a ton of stuff from the uh Gothic speaking world.

[00:02:48]I don't think that that's any sort of proof that they're not using runes very much because I suspect that for the most part runes are being used to carve on organic materials that aren't surviving today. A lot of what they're using is wood.

[00:03:00]I think that beyond the existence of runic inscriptions carved in Eastern Europe that have linguistic features in common with Gothic like the Koval spearhead that the fact that Alcoin records the names of the Gothic letters and they're the names of the runes is pretty good evidence that Goths know runes and that again this alphabet is initially being taught to people who already know those runes. Now, it's been argued that when Aluan gives the names of the Gothic alphabet that he's being influenced by the names of the runes in Old English. He might be getting influenced by them a little bit, but I think he's hearing Gothic words. Is just there's too many places where it looks like a Gothic word and not like a modified Anglo-Saxon word. For example, do as the name of the D room that looks like, you know, docs, right? That's got the sibling at the end. That doesn't look like what you would come up with from old English d.

[00:04:04]So, if the letters of the Gothic alphabet have runic names, I think that's really good evidence that the people who are originally being taught that alphabet already know their runic names. because this is exactly what I would do if I were teaching you a new alphabet. And I do this all the time when I'm teaching people new alphabets because I do in classes, you know, I used to in classes UCLA or Berkeley or Colorado. Now I have these Zoom classes that I do on my own. I teach people runes. I teach people the Gothic alphabet. And I mostly don't use the native names of letters, right? I am mostly saying like the the F rune. I mostly don't say feu, right? And the reason I do that is because you're already literate. You already have these categories like, oh, this is sort of transferable from the categories that I already know from an alphabet that I've previously learned.

[00:05:00]And if you have a relatively recently converted population among the gods and Wolfilo wants to introduce a new alphabet that's more like Greek, which makes perfect sense. He wants this to be sort of more accepted by the civilized world. He wants us to look to clerics in the Roman world, like a Bible and not like a, you know, more more foreign, more barbarian artifact.

[00:05:28]He still wants to teach the people who already know how to write the the rune masters to use a to use a term and just using the letter names that they're already familiar with, right?

[00:05:42]Even though the D letter, see there, I'm doing it in English. Um, looks like a Greek unsealed delta from the mid300s.

[00:05:51]He's still calling it what it doesn't look like, but what it sounds like in the frame of reference of somebody who already knows runs. He's calling it probably like Doc's day based on the fact that the uh old English name for it is day. I don't and actually the old nor name of it is inferably day because we do see um one early younger fool incription that still uses that D to stand for probably the man's name Dogger.

[00:06:20]Um, okay. So, I think this actually explains part of why the alphabet is a little bit of a combination of the Greek alphabet and the Fuar alphabet because I think he wants it to look again acceptably civilized to another Roman world cleric who's not familiar with Gothic, but also acceptably familiar to a Goth who already knows the runic alphabet. And part of the way that you're going to do that is you're going to make the beginning of the alphabet look acceptably familiar to those two groups.

[00:06:54]So probably based on Alcoin his his and the fact that the numerical values line up with the numerical values of Greek letters which are based on their position in the alphabet. He's presenting this alphabet in Greek order.

[00:07:10]And you go alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, and those initial letters look Greek. Okay? So, hey, I'm presenting this to a Roman world cleric in Greek order. And he's saying like, yeah, okay, this is starting to look good familiar way.

[00:07:26]But if you present the Gothic alphabet in runic order, the first three letters also look like their runic equivalents. Right?

[00:07:38]From inscriptions in the Germanic speaking world that list out the entire fra the entire alphabet, we see that they are super consistent about the order of the first letters, right? We see them write fark fuark fua an all the time but then as they get to the middle of it they start to really vary their order right um and especially toward the end we find a very very uh mixed up set of orders I think that probably reflects how they're learning these letters that they learn the first part of the series a lot better than they learn the last part of the series.

[00:08:22]Um, a really good comparison to this that was brought to my attention by one of my students is we don't necessarily know the cordy order very well past cordy, right? Like try to remember without looking at it what the bottom third of the keyboard on a cordy keyboard is and you may not have it memorized. I I don't I just know that, you know, I can do the first two. So, I think they're kind of similar. But I think if you start that alphabet again, if you're presenting it in fa order and you get fa and those look like the runes, that's nice and familiar for your uh Gothic rune masters who are learning the new alphabet like okay passes a familiarity test for me. So it's passing both a foothark and an alpha beta gamma familiarity test. I think that's a really critical insight into why certain letters look more renters and those three are among the three that really do. Um you know notice that there is a letter that means fu in wolfless time in Greek unsules and it's fi right so in ancient Greek more ancient Greek than this that's an aspirated p it's not an f sound but we know it's an f sound at the time part of how we know that is that wolf transcribes Greek words that are written with fi in gothic with an f with this gothic f letter that looks like rf or like a runic So he has access to that Greek letter.

[00:09:48]He doesn't use it. Part of that again is I think hey when I'm breaking in those rune masters, I want them to see, you know, three letters that look the same.

[00:09:58]It's the three letters that are most familiar to them at the beginning. But another reason is that I think that probably the thorn letter that looked like a fi uh the thorn with two uh bows on either end was more common uh than we assume. We see it in the Hill Rub old finds which are not vastly older than Wolf's Bible and uh potentially on other finds. This runs into a problem of, you know, people disagreeing about how to interpret some isolated finds. Here's the digest version of the leftover letter argument for those who haven't heard me make it a million times.

[00:10:38]When the Greeks borrow the alphabet the first time, they get a 22let alphabet from the Phoenetians, but it's technically an obj or all the letters stand for consonants.

[00:10:50]The Greeks don't need all those consonants, but they don't want to get rid of letters. This becomes a big theme in the history of alphabets that people don't want to get rid of letters, even ones they don't need, and they may repurpose them. So for example, we see that's four consonants the Greeks don't need.

[00:11:08]They use those letters for vowels instead. Okay. Now the alphabet that becomes runes is ultimately derived from Greek. I am not arguing that Greeks taught Germanic speakers the fuark but in at some level of remove this comes from a Greek alphabet just like our alphabet does.

[00:11:32]The Greek alphabet is the direct parent alphabet to most of the alphabets of the west. Now I think that there are letters in that Greek derived alphabet probably one used by Celtic speakers in the Alps that I think they are learning. Okay, Phoenicians are teaching Greeks to write. Greeks are teaching Atruscans to write and atruscans are teaching Celtic speakers in the Alps to write. And I think those Celtic speakers in the Alps are who are teaching Germanic speakers to write or who Germanic speakers are adopting the idea of writing from. I think that we can see there's at Truskin mediation in this system from the fact that the old G letter which Atruscans didn't need gets repurposed as another C. Right? This is also something that happens in the history of our alphabet. The Romans learned to write from Atruscans 2.

[00:12:20]That's a great example of that leftover letter phenomenon itself because English inherits a three letters that all mean a C sound because that's those are three letters of trustins didn't want to get rid of even though they only needed the one C.

[00:12:35]Okay. I think that early Germanic speakers the inventor inventors the runic alphabet are seeing an alphabet like this that don't need D. That's better covered for them by the fricative of e, which we actually see used in exactly this shape. It's derived from aan. This is another leftover letter that Leontic speakers, early Celtic speakers in the Alps, reused. Uh, didn't want to get rid of the letter, so they turned it into one that they actually needed an e sound. This is a better match to the d phone in early Germanic languages anyway. In fact, there may not have been a d-stop in early Germanic languages to judge from how some names are written in early Latin texts. I think they don't need omacron because they have omega and omega is long just like Germanic O always is. Those two letters are just going to fall to the wayside. I think that this early W consonant is going to fall to the wayside. This is called the gamma in Greek because this looks exactly like or almost exactly like the A. This is more psychologically salient. It's at the beginning of the alphabet. I don't think they've reordered it to the fuart order at the very beginning yet. And if you look at u some languages that use these alpine and truscan derived alphabets like leont and radic often this a and this w look exactly the same. So I think they they don't like this. They don't want this. But I think there's a bunch of other letters they don't need either that they're going to wind up doing some interesting stuff with. They don't need these sequences z.

[00:14:10]They don't need these special letters for aspir. It's bc right in in araic ancient Greek. This isn't th it's t-c. They don't need to make that distinction from the unaspirated TPK. That doesn't really matter in a Germanic language.

[00:14:28]They also don't need the sequence.

[00:14:31]They don't need this extra C. I think those are the exact letters which all share some features, right?

[00:14:38]They're all archaic redundancies like the Q copa. They're all aspirates or their sequences and z and all of those letters are great candidates for letters we don't want to get rid of but we want to reuse for sounds we actually have. Notice that on the ilerup old fines, we actually see thorn with a double bowed form that looks like fi w and a double bowed form that looks like copa. And there are other finds that have those shapes too.

[00:15:21]I think and I'm going to argue in the more speculative second half of this video that wolf actually knows thorn in this shape. It does look quite a bit more like the gothic fi.

[00:15:31]Okay. And I think that the re, you know, there there's not like necessarily a sound relationship between that C and that W. I don't think that they're saying, well, this sounds like this. I think it's just this is a leftover letter. Let's use it for something that we need. And exactly how each sound gets assigned to each letter, I don't know.

[00:15:53]But I think that these are very strong candidate letters again for we don't want to get rid of these letters.

[00:16:00]as many letters as we can not get rid of, but let's reuse them for something we need. I think that it's quite possible this letter that we really don't know the original meaning of did originally mean something like qua. I think Wola provides some evidence that this letter derived potentially from theta. He does have a dot in the middle of it. Might have originally meant hua as opposed to. I'm going to get into that a little bit in the more speculative second half of this video.

[00:16:23]these two uh very very different in Gothic from the runic incriptions that we know. But remember that Gothic is actually Wolf and Gothic is pretty early, right?

[00:16:34]I mean like we're looking at something that's contemporary with some of the earlier runic inscriptions that we know.

[00:16:40]I think there's a lot potentially that's going on with runes uh that we should use Wolf's alphabet as a potential source for. And keep in mind that we may be surprised by how some of these letters are used in in earlier inscriptions. I'm not married to this idea. I just think that it's got some potential. I think that the Y letter could potentially come from that sai which also has separated elements and g from old kai and their z from old sai.

[00:17:10]Remember that this is an actual Z as opposed to the Z sequence that the Greek uh letter originally was.

[00:17:20]So I think then that uh this is a very potentially uh powerful explanation of where the shapes of the runes come from. uh adding f from the Roman alphabet or some similar italic alphabet as it's the only place where this letter came to have a f sound. But uh that kind of mixed origin where one letter is coming from another alphabet is quite normal. It's something that Wolf did as I'm arguing in this video basing most of his alphabet on Greek but also deriving some of his letters from runic. And I do think that the runic alphabet that he knew very potentially had Thorn in this more phyll like shape. Hence the more phyl like shape that wolf has. All right back to the actual main part of this video now.

[00:18:09]Right. How many runic inscriptions actually precede the Gothic Bible?

[00:18:13]There's not that many. Right. There's the you find hoola or spingerude what I've called vines since it was discovered because that's what the longest part of its text that we can read says.

[00:18:28]uh some of the Vimosa offerings, ill gold all finds, tushberry, chape and and shield boss barless aphibula maybe tuna stone maybe. Then again there's some really speculative ones like the Milder Fibula and you know whether you count the NAL helmet as runes or whatever but Wolf's Bible is actually produced at a time that's like it's still contemporary with a lot of our earliest runic inscriptions. I don't know that we have enough of a picture given how few inscriptions we have from then and earlier to say that this definitely wasn't a pretty common variant of thorn uh that has the two the two bows in either end. And I think that that's influencing the letter that he's choosing to mean Thorn and that's making Fi unavailable to him for F.

[00:19:18]Okay.

[00:19:20]So I think he's teaching people who already know runes and he wants futhe to look like runes and they do and that doesn't conflict with much of his use of otherwise Greek letters. I don't feel like this is a hugely weird speculative uh thought to have.

[00:19:43]Now, I want to mention to you that I have really good friends in Sweden who have really good stuff that if you watch this channel, you might have an interest in. They have my books. They have nice runic uh stuff that's actually not super inacronistic in the way that it's spelled sometimes because I've done the runes for them. They have cool reproduction Viking games and weapons and jewelry and stuff like that. And of course, those are my friends and partners at Grimfrost. And I want you to know that if you support them, you're supporting this channel, especially if you tell them that you heard about them here. Uh those guys are really cool. So, please head over there and uh give them a shout. They do eat tariff fees and import fees and all that stuff as of May 2026. Still, having said that, let me pivot into something a little bit more controversial.

[00:20:39]I don't know that we are actually absolutely right about the original values of certain letters and runes.

[00:20:51]I think that maybe Wolfila is showing us that there are two runes that mean things that we don't realize they originally meant.

[00:21:03]there's a raven calling in support that god knows the audio is going to show up in this. Um, and I think that those two two letters in the runic alphabet that we may be sort of wrong about are the ones that we traditionally call ingu and assumes means an ing sound like the sound at the end of sing or ring and the one that you know there is no absolute agreed meaning for people often reconstruct the name ahas. Uh it's right next to the p room. Um, we don't absolutely know what that stood for. All right, the wind noise was such and uh I went on and on and on so much uh that I just want to restate this more concisely in a quieter environment.

[00:21:52]Here is what I am speculating, not not suggesting so much speculating.

[00:22:02]I wonder if two seldom seen runes in Elder Fuark and two unique letters in the Gothic alphabet have something to do with each other.

[00:22:14]Here is how I'd outline this. There are two runes in Elder Food Arc that we don't really see very much of at all.

[00:22:22]Actually, I mean, there's more than two runes we don't see much of at all, but two in particular I want to focus on.

[00:22:28]one is presumed to have the sound of ing because of how its old English descendant is used and because its old English descendant is called something that is suggested that it be reconstructed as ing.

[00:22:41]Alkowind does say that Gothic has a letter called ingus 2, but we never see an ing letter in Gothic, right? Gothic writes ing as two gamas the same way that Greek does. And in Elder Footh arc, it's actually pretty easy and definitely done to just write this as a G. We do not see this very much in use in Elder Fac, right? I think the earliest inscription that it's used in is the Opidal inscription where it's actually not even all that clear that that's what this is being used for in what's interpreted as a a woman's name Burgingu. But then the ingua [clears throat] stands for the entire syllable ing. And that's how we mostly see it is actually with a bar through it in a form that means the entire sequence.

[00:23:29]Okay.

[00:23:31]But I would say that what Alowin tells us is that there is a Gothic letter called Angus or or Ingua, something like that. The old English rune poem is telling us, you know, yes, in England, this is used as an ing.

[00:23:46]But that doesn't necessarily tell us that in the earliest Elder Fu arc, it was this letter that meant ing or indeed that there was a letter that meant at all as the spelling G is available for this sound.

[00:24:01]Okay. Another letter that we have trouble with is this one which shows up either to the left or to the right of the P rune. Another rune that we don't see very much of.

[00:24:11]usually reconstructed with the names Awaz based only really on old English a uh this rune doesn't survive in younger fark so we don't have an old Norse name Same thing here this doesn't survive in old and younger fark so we don't have an old Norse name we never see this rune in early elerark inscriptions in words it is used when the entire alphabet is listed out right when you do the entire ABCDE the entire foothark but not to write words. I think the earliest known use of it in a word is on the ketor estragulus deer's ankle bone where it says Ryhon and there it's just being used as a variant of I.

[00:24:55]Okay. So there's two elder runes that aren't used much. Here's two letters Wolffilla has that are really unique. Wol has a letter for H. Right, the way I say what, [snorts] usually transcribed in the Roman alphabet this way. Alawin says that the letter's name is, you know, where however he was going to say this. Uh, this is usually interpreted as being Wolf and Gothic. Uh, because letters should start with the sound that they represent.

[00:25:28]Uh, and Wolf has a consonant for qua, right? the sound in quite or something like that. That's transcribed Q in the Roman alphabet. Now, Aluan says the name of this letter is quertra. And there is a letter that looks like this in old English.

[00:25:46]Notice that that's just like that letter usually called ao just bowed, right? Like the relationship between a uh elder foothark a and the uh a that's used in the old English food.

[00:26:02]And this in three different manuscripts that have old English rune names is called quor or quer the cur. At any rate certainly this and this look a lot like this. I would suggest to you that is a more evidenced rune name than this awas thing.

[00:26:26]Right? The basis for this is the old English rune poem. And maybe if you really really struggle some other name in Aluan. This I would say is actually like this may really be what this this rune which I think may really be this rune is originally doing because Wolf got the idea for these runes from something right. If he came up with the notion of writing his own letter, his own qua letter. He's not getting that from the Roman letter, from the Roman alphabet. He's not getting that from the Greek alphabet of his time.

[00:27:06]He's not getting that from the runic out alphabet as we know it. But Wolf is actually pretty early in terms of uh our written sources for Germanic language, right? If he's in the mid-300s, there's not that many runa inscriptions that go back earlier than that, right? I mean there's uh the vimosome there's the spinger root stone or hula stain there's um iller old doll finds there's not a lot uh from that early so we're I'm not saying you know I'm I'm arguing from an absence of evidence I just want to point out the absence of evidence that that we are in fact somewhat underinformed about early centuries and I don't think that it's impossible although I'm not saying that this is necessar really positive evidence for it that at some time this letter was hu and this letter was qua and that the reason we're not seeing that part of the reason we're not seeing that is that it's just so much easier to learn to write this as a sequence hw it's so much easier to learn to write this as a sequence kw if people are learning the runes from their names they're also learning these runes which come earlier in the through dark sequence before they're learning those cuaqua runes potentially.

[00:28:27]I think there's something really appealing about that. Although it's easier to support, oddly enough, for theqa idea than for the ha idea, just because we've got this name. Uh, now coming up with a Germanic explanation for quer is not easy. One explanation is that it could have something to do with a candle wick. Uh, interesting idea.

[00:28:46]That's the only uh etmology I've ever seen for it in u in a Germanic language.

[00:28:55]I'm trying to remember who suggested that. I think it's Patrick Styles as reported in Miller's Gothic Grammar that suggested that. And by the way, I don't think I'm the first person to suggest that Wolf could have gotten these sound values from an earlier version of the runic alphabet. I think Saka in the mid-9th century um had notions like this and it's occasionally been kind of brooded since.

[00:29:25]But anyway, what I was going to say is this quertra is a lot like the P letterra which old English sources called por and those kind of look like Celtic names, right? Welsh Perth means bush, Irish uh carrot, I believe, apple tree. Those are both from the same protokeeltic name that you know a goalish or leontic version of could have given us uh one or the other or both of these uh these Germanic uh rune names. I kind of wonder if some of the rune names could be actually borrowed straight from Celtic without being translated from Celtic.

[00:30:00]Right. I do hold to the view that um an in ancient Celtic language which does not mean old in British. Remember that there's Celtic speakers in the Alps in the last centuries BC and that some of the alphabets that most closely resemble runes including the one used by Leontic speakers that uses this variant of the Greek letter son to write E exactly like the you know the D or E sound exactly like uh runes. uh those I think are very plausible sources for the runes and for the word rune right protokeeltic or gullish runa which we reconstruct on the basis of old Irish rune etc means secret you would borrow that with its long a at the end into Germanic runo because a long ah in Celtic will be borrowed as a long O in Germanic and that is the word ancestral to Gothic runa or old Norse rune which in our earliest run of conscriptions remember that rune is the message right in Nulabi I made a I made a rune run though that's I made the whole message um and that's a secret between you and the person who can read it at any rate what if this is my big what if and um I I made it with a prettier background, but uh way more words than this, believe it or not, and way too much wind. My My question is, my what if is could these two runes that we don't see very much have something to do with these two very unique letters that Wolf uses? There is some support for that in the names of these letters and runes. There is some support for it just in the fact that it is such a unique idea to convey hua and qua and we don't know where he got it.

[00:32:04]He could be a genius who came up with it on his own. Or maybe the genius who came up with doing that lived a lot earlier and only among the Goths uh by the mid-300s was it remembered what these letters originally were used for. And we just happen to see the fossil of how the runes were used in the Gothic alphabet but not in surviving runic inscriptions.

[00:32:29]I do think there was a rune named Inguis because or something like that because uh Alcohen records a letter that has a name like that. Enus is what he says.

[00:32:39]But that's the uh like kai. That's a letter that um that Wolf is just using for its numerical value. And I mean he uses it as kai to to transliterate like the the kai in Greek, you know, Christos. But there we have so few rens incriptions again that are that are contemporaneous with wolf or earlier than wolf. None of those to my memory contain the inguazin at all. Um unless you want to push this forward to the silver stone which is the first far incription full inscription which does have that letter but of course it doesn't tell you what it sound is. It's just listed as one of the letters.

[00:33:22]Could it be What we've been calling ahas is actually qura actually originally means qua. What we've been calling inguaz is actually where actually means huah originally and that by the time that we're seeing inscriptions with these hundreds of years after this alphabet is invented.

[00:33:41]People have forgotten what those letters mean. Wolfila exists in a living runic tradition where they are still used correctly originally though and knows the zerun as inguas right I don't think so I guess what I'm saying is I don't think there's originally an rune that we're actually kind of wrong or the old English tradition starts getting wrong that that's what that originally mean means because that's actually not that necessary right I think the earliest inscription where we see ingu used like inga was like ing is the uppidal stone where you see what's probably the name burging goo where that you know supposed ingu is between two u two gvu runes two g runes but this rune is really kind of unnecessary in the system because they typically just don't write those nasals before home organic consonants you can just you can write in the ingua sound as a g right which by the way pretty similar to what Wolf does, although he's doing it under Greek influence, right? He's just like Greek writes messenger angalos with two gamas.

[00:34:51]He writes the word derived from that with two gamas. That may actually be the influence of not just Greek, but actually early tradition that we just don't have a lot of access to because again, all this stuff has degraded over 2,000 years.

[00:35:05]And it's impossible for us to really know what the name of the zebr rune was originally because you cannot reconstruct just one name for it from old Norse maroon poem. Old room poem versus oldic run poem versus old English room poem because you're in different places.

[00:35:22]Some younger fuar inscriptions actually use that zeroom to mean e, which may imply that there were areas where its name started with an e vowel, which would not be impossible for something coming from an inguaz starting point.

[00:35:39]And it kind of doesn't matter what this rune was called acryonically because if there's no rune, then the only rune that can't start with its name in the Elder Footh arc system that I'm speculating originally existed is that Z. So just any word that ends in Z can be that.

[00:36:00]So if Wolf is keeping all of the original runes and all their original names, he may be just taking that Enu Ingua's name that's originally the Z rune, applying that to this rune, this letter that he doesn't really need except for numerical counting and you know maybe transcribing Greek kai.

[00:36:24]But then why is he taking the Greek zeta and calling it Ezek, which does not look like a Germanic word either, but that's the the name recorded in alcohol.

[00:36:36]I think that Miller points out an interesting possibility that that Ezek has a Roman name for it that's from ID Zeta, right? Z that Zeta Zeta itself.

[00:36:48]And that the reason that he's taking that name is that he wants to emphasize like the acrophonic principle or something close to the acrophonic principle, right? This isn't the sound that this isn't the this isn't the ending sound.

[00:37:01]It's this sound after this vowel. I think that might be maybe uh important to him. It may also just be that he thinks that the zerun looks too much like sigh. I think this system is largely forgotten that maybe early on, you know, in a a layer that we may just not see very much written at a station of, they're using that O like letter that we've been calling inguas for a long time to mean hua. They're using that letter we've been calling ahas for a long time to mean.

[00:37:40]And there just is no un letter.

[00:37:44]eventually this is forgotten because there's sequences and people like I'll just write hw instead of hua I'll just write kw instead ofqa but that this has not been entirely forgotten by goths in the 300s and that wol is adapting this very reasonable system for writing a Germanic language and he wants to teach other people who speak Gothic and who know that runic system but he also wants to bring them into what he sees as the modern sophisticated world and he wants to make the shape of most of these letters look more like Greek, but he also wants it to be familiar enough to a Gothic speaker who's familiar with Fuark and thinks, you know, their their point of familiarity is especially the first three letters, F, U, th. And so that's what he starts u starts them with uh when they're first learning the offense.

[00:38:35]C is in the CZ. Then you get to the A, right, in F's arc. That's the first letter of the Greek alphab. But he wants that to look more like Greek. So it looks again more sophisticated, more, you know, cosmopolitan for his Roman world audience, right? He wants to show them manuscripts that look right and not just like, uh, you know, barbarian foreign litters as they might perceive it.

[00:39:05]Gosh, this is probably a pretty disorganized presentation, but um those are the thoughts that you get from me sometimes.

[00:39:13]I hope that was somewhat interesting.

[00:39:15]I'm not necessarily going to convince anybody, but these are some thoughts that I'm having about this alphabet right now. And of course, we're not going to have any sort of proof of this notion that there was originally a hua and a qua rune unless we see it show up in an inscription. And you know, new inscriptions do get discovered that hula stain, sphinger stain, the the one with Idy now known to be the oldest renic incription that we we know we can date. That was only brought to light in early 2023. Brought to public light in early 2023.

[00:39:50]So other new things could be coming. I really do think that I'm maybe on to something with quorra that letter originally being that qua and that it's being forgotten because it's a sequence. Um I don't think it's a coincidence that that name shows up in both Gothic and old English. That's a better addestation for that rune name than we have for the hypothetical name AOS. Right? Because that's based on nothing but trying to reconstruct backwards from one source, the old English source.

[00:40:19]This qua name you can actually reconstruct from two sources, Gothic and Old English. That makes me actually pretty happy with that notion. I'm more happy with that than with the notion that the little diamond rune is a originally. But I think that that's really symmetrical and nice and that you also have again that mechanism for people forgetting it, which is that it's a sequence, right? The same reason that people uh today uh you know want to write words that have Q's in them with K's because it's like ah what do I need Q for? Well, we don't need Q. We just write it traditionally. Um but Q is probably going to survive another few hundred years because so many people learn to write English and put up with its foibless. The community of people writing runes is probably always a little bit smaller. Doesn't have you know dictionaries. So it's going to change a lot more over time. And I think that we are seeing even on our earlier Scandinavian preserved inscriptions, Scandinavian and other continental inscriptions, we're seeing something that's been developing for a while and is not in its original state anymore.

[00:41:23]And I'm kind of intrigued by the notion that Wolfilla knows it in a more original state. And even though he's adopting that more original state to a more Greek shape, its state may in fact be closer to the original Elder Fark.

[00:41:38]That's my main thesis. You're tired of hearing it. My mouth is tired of saying it. Thanks for your support on Patreon.

[00:41:46]Thanks for taking those Zoom classes.

[00:41:48]Thanks for checking out my translations of Old Norse. And from beautiful Colorado, close to beautiful Dinosaur Lake. I'm wishing you all the best.