Around the year 800, a new nordic alphabet arose. This development
is likely to have taken place in Denmark, where the majority of the
earliest inscriptions employing these characters in found. In short
order, this new alphabet spread to Norway and Sweden, where various
innovations where made both in the forms of these 16 runes and their
phonological accuracy. Swedish engravers were the most instrumental
in pioneering new form of these 16 runes, while the Norwegians took
the lead in using dots to avoid the confusion created by trying to
represent to many separate sounds by a single rune. The novel forms
created in Sweden include such developments as "stutrĂșnar", which
simplified engraving by using abreviated forms of the runes, while
the Norwegian dotted runes eventually came to be known as "stungnar
rĂșnar". Experiments and various combinations of these practices can
be found throughout Scandinavia on numerous Viking Age runestones,
testifying to the alphabetic creativity of the engravers. However,
as there where no schools teaching standardized spelling and no
printed media available to learn it from, no standardized system of
spelling was adopted for all of Scandinavia. Any modern runologist
can testify to the confusion and uncertainty involved in trying to
accurately transcribe inscriptions from this period. To help solve
this problem I propose that we adopt an international Scandinavian
phonetic alphabet, for use by scholars and laymen alike. In order to
ensure historical accuracy, this alphbet will consist only of the
original 16 Danish runic characters and be capable of accurately
transcribing any Scandinavian dialect from about 800 until 1300. The
appearance of this alphabet will be substantially identical to that
found on the earliest Danish inscriptions employing it, rejecting
all later developments exept the practice of punctuation and certain
runic variants conducive to printed elagance. These runes will be
tall and skiny, employing only strait vertical lines and strait
lines extending from these vertical lines. No horizontal lines will
be allowed for reasons of elegance. As the forms of the runes were
evolved through the practice of carving on wood, our printed texts
should elegantly reflect this history. Our runes will be measured
for precision and printed using software capable of ensuring total
uniformity in regard to the length of lines and the placement of all
dots. As on many classical runestones, our runes will appear between
two separate horizontal lines and will include no markings of any
kind above or below these lines. If we were to remove the dots from
our runes, then our text should appear precisely as on a classical
Danish runestone from about 800-900. Finally, our dots will never
occur on any line, but rather beside it, thus ensuring elegance and
uniformity in the size of dots. Can we accuratly represent all Norse
sounds from 800-1300 using only 16 characters and little black dots?
The answer is yes. We can even do it in such as fashion as to rival
the elegance of printed angular Arabic, which also employs dots,
while at the same time presenting a text which King Gorm the Old
could easily read with no training of any kind. Furthermore, our
alphabet will not only be historically accurate, it will also be
more pholologically accurate than the modified Latin alphabet used
to print Old Norse today. If I have provoked your curiosity, then
please begin by reading my next post - 36 Simple Danish Vowals.

Regards,
Konrad.