At 5:40:29 AM on Monday, February 24, 2003, tgpedersen
<
tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> The symbol R was used in the beginning to transliterate a
> certain rune that was used in cases where the later Old
> Norse had /r/. I believe the consensus is now that since
> we don't have any direct evidence of how it was pronounced
> and since it developped from Germanic /z/, it might as
> well be written as z.
Not so far as I know. E.g., Ralph W.V. Elliott, 'The Runic
Script' (in Daniels & Bright, eds., _The World's Writing
Systems_, Oxford, 1996), discussing the Danish futhark, says
that the old common Gmc. z-rune 'represents uvular [R],
transcribed <R>'. I'm not particularly taken with his
notion that the intermediate stage was [R], but he clearly
prefers to transcribe <R>. Haugen (as of 1982) transcribes
<z> for early inscriptions and <R> for somewhat later ones
(taking the view that the latter is perhaps to be
interpreted as [Z]).
Brian