Sæll Jón!

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "jonaegilsen
<jonaegilsen@...>" <jonaegilsen@...> wrote:

> Greetings Konrad! I think the runes are very exellent. Briliant.

It is I think very much better than the latin letters. You should
have some award from Scandinavia for this. I am waiting to buy books
from your name. But I do not see your Ord Hervarar in runes so far?

>
> Jon

Thank you for your interest. 'Rýniska' is just strait Viking Age Old
Norse punctuated to very Old Icelandic. The 16 runes are not new. We
can thank our ancestors for them. The idea of punctuation is not new
either. The 'rýniska' characters for natural E and Y from U are also
old developments from the later Viking Age. 'Rýniska' is not 'new' -
it is simply a way of punctuating which is consistent with modern
linguistic knowledge about the origins and character of Old Norse.
The different spellings for short and long O (and their mutations),
for instance, can be seen on old runestones. The only thing 'new'
in 'rýniska' is that we employ one set of historic O-spellings (åu)
when the sounds descend from Proto-Norse Ó and another (u) when the
sounds descend from Proto-Norse U/Ú. My goal is not to be original,
but rather to write Old Norse like Old Norse - as the Norse of the
Viking Age did, but with phonetic and etymological precision. Think
of it this way: King Gormr, as well as any other Norse-speaker who
understood runes 100 years before or after his time, would be able
to read and understand 'rýniska' without any instruction. We could
simply hand him a book and say 'read' - after a few chapters, the
punctuation would explain itself. While it is true that King Gormr
might not always be sure as to WHY we spell certain words the way we
do, he would nevertheless understand them. Gormr spoke better Norse
than we do today, but we possess the modern linguistic understanding
required to write his language correctly and to make it 'sing' from
the printed page. Our modern linguistics is also far in advance of
what any Catholic-educated scribe from the middle ages would be able
to understand. We have no need of preparing hides or picking berries
to write. We have no need for a foreign alphabet. What we have is a
refined modern linguistics combined with superior technology - thus
it has fallen to the folk of our time to write Norse the right way.
In doing so, we honour those from whom we inherited both the tongue
and the characters it is written in. If you consider how superb our
ancestors´ technology was for its time and how fine their craftsman-
ship was, then it is not difficult to see that they would understand
and approve of a refined way of writing their own language. What is
most important is that they would be able to read it for themselves.
I would call 'rýniska' a tool for allowing our ancestors to speak
for themselves through their own letters. I would also call it an
educational tool for modern speakers and readers of Norse - like the
Latin, it is easy to read; unlike the Latin, it displays the true
history of the language, enabling the 'man in the street' to under-
stand his tongue better without the benefit of a formal education. I
suspect that King Gormr would agree with this approach. The langskip
was not only elegant and attractive, it was also superior technology
at sea - so should a system of writing be. Today we have the tools
to do justice to our ancestral tongue and make our ancestors smile.

Regards,
Konrad.

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Haukur Thorgeirsson

> <haukurth@...> wrote:
> > Heil.
> >
> > I've scanned in the rune sheets Konrad sent me.
> >
> > http://www.hi.is/~haukurth/norse/konrad/
> >
> > Kveðja,
> > Haukur