The "hooked o" is the Old Norse character which causes the meanest
pain in the butt for those who want to use the original spelling
system when posting Old Norse texts. A less mean character is the "oe
ligature". The characters "thorn" ,"eth", "ae ligature", "o slash"
and to some extent the diacritics (á, é,...; ö) cause some trouble as
well.
I see no point in using alternative spelling for "thorn" ,"eth", "ae
ligature", "o slash". But for "hooked o" and "oe ligature" one needs
to have an alternative. My proposition is:

The Old Norse manuscripts' "hooked o" is denoted with 'õ' and
the Old Norse manuscripts' "oe ligature" is denoted 'ö'.

Thus, the plural nominative indefinite form of 'bóndi' is
written 'böndir' (one dot on top of 'o' to denote i-umlaut, one dot
to denote length - this is not far from late medieval rune spelling
conventions), and the plural dative indefinite form of 'maðr' is
written 'mõnnum'.

Personally, I would prefer to use 'å' - "a with a ring on top" -
instead of 'õ' denoting "hooked o" since then we see clear that we
are dealing with an umlauted a (the ring suggesting an u-umlaut, see
e.g. "ae ligature" as being an i-umlauted á). The problem is that
probably only Norse keyboards have a special key (or obvious key
combination) to produce 'å' - "a-ring". If 'å' - "a-ring" - would be
in use, 'mõnnum' (ON 'm/hooked o/nnum', MI 'mönnum') would become a
very logical 'månnum' - 'm/a-ring/nnum'.


What about my ideas?


Sklär,
Jóhannes "Sjúrður" Bernhardsson



--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "[ kubrick36 ]" <kubrick36@...>
wrote:

> Could someone please tell me where I can find a font for Old Norse

including

> the hooked-o? I have looked everywhere and cannot find one. I

followed a

> thread on norse_course from February of 2001 but it led nowhere as

all of

> its links had expired. Please, where can I get this font? I would

very

> much appreciate it if someone could send me such a file.
> -William
>
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