very powerful set of elder futhark runes

The Elder Futhark rune ᛉ is conventionally called Algiz or Elhaz, from the Common Germanic word for ' elk'. The shape of the rune may be derived from that of a letter expressing /x/ in certain Old Italic alphabets ( 𐌙), which was in turn derived from the Greek letter Ψ which had the value of /kʰ/ (rather than /ps/) in the Western Greek alphabet. This phoneme eventually became indistinguishable from the regular r sound in the later stages of Old Norse, at about the 11th or 12th century. This sound was written in the Younger Futhark using the Yr rune ᛦ, the Algiz rune turned upside down, from about the 7th century. In Proto-Norse and Old Norse, the Germanic *z phoneme developed into an R sound, perhaps realized as a retroflex approximant, which is usually transcribed as ʀ.

However, possibly due to runic manuscript tradition, it was occasionally used to transliterate the Latin letter X into the runic script. In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc it retained its shape, but became otiose as it ceased to represent any sound in an Old English. As the terminal *-z phoneme marks the nominative singular suffix of masculine nouns, the rune occurs comparatively frequently in early epigraphy.īecause this specific phoneme was lost at an early time, the Elder Futhark rune underwent changes in the medieval runic alphabets. It is one of two runes which express a phoneme that does not occur word-initially, and thus could not be named acrophonically, the other being the ŋ-rune Ingwaz ᛜ.

Its transliteration is z, understood as a phoneme of the Proto-Germanic language, the terminal *z continuing Proto-Indo-European terminal *s. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of runes.Īlgiz (also Elhaz) is the name conventionally given to the ' z-rune' ᛉ of the Elder Futhark runic alphabet.

Very powerful set of elder futhark runes