--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Xolotl Grimnir <xolotl2001@...>
wrote:

>
> I've been looking at all the pronunciation guides that I can find

and i can't find anything that

> explains why some words have a capital R at the end of them.
>
> All I know is that in runic spelling a Elhaz rune is used for the R

instead of Raidho.

>
> What sound does this character represent?
>
> -Juan

Hi Juan,

The capital 'R' is sometimes used by modern day scholars when they
transcribe runic inscriptions into the Roman alphabet. It represents
a sound in the Viking Age Nordic language which came from
Proto-Germanic /z/, and which eventually merged with /r/ (from
Proto-Germanic /r/). You might see some people using 'z' instead of
'R', especially for the earlier (pre Viking Age) inscriptions.

The merge took place at different times in different parts of
Scandinavia at the end of the Viking Age, around the turn of the first
millennium of the Christian Era. By the time that Old Norse
manuscripts were being produced in Iceland and Norway (from the 12th
century onwards), the change was already complete in these regions and
speakers used /r/ in all positions. Since the old sound 'R' no longer
existed in the language when the Roman alphabet was adapted for
writing Old Norse, no special character was needed. Here are two
examples from the Eggjum stone inscription, Norway c. 800, when the
two sounds were still distinct.

Viking Age Norse: fiskR "fish"
(Medieval) Old Norse/Icelandic: fiskr

Viking Age Norse: snariR "bold" (masculine plural)
(Medieval) Old Norse/Icelandic: snarir.

The sound could also occur in the middle of words, e.g. 'uaRin' (in
the 9th century Rök stone inscription from southern Sweden) = Old
Norse/Icelandic 'váru' "were". But it ever occurs at the beginning of
a word.

*

PRONUNCIATION:

No one knows for sure how this 'R' or 'z' was pronounced at any given
date or location, but there are clues in the history of the language.
We know that it descended from a sound in Proto-Germanic which is
reconstructed as /z/, probably a voiced alveolar fricative, as in the
English word 'zero'. This sound arose when its voiceless counterpart
/s/ (from Proto-Indo-European /s/) occurred after an unstressed
syllable; in fact there is a general rule called Verner's Law which
states that voiceless fricatives became voiced in Proto-Germanic when
not immediately preceded by a stressed syllable in the same word.
Roman writers transcribed this sound in Germanic names as 's'. They
had no letter to represent voicing of this sound in their alphabet;
'z', taken from the Greek alphabet, originally represented an
affricate /dz/. 's' also appears for Germanic /z/ in a couple of
Latin inscriptions from the border of Germania dedicated to Germanic
goddesses. By the time the Goths were converted to Christianity and
began to use an alphabet of their own derived from the Greek alphabet,
Greek 'z' had come to represent the sound /z/. The Gothic alphabet
uses a letter identical to Greek 'z' to represent a sound derived from
Proto-Germanic /z/. And in Gothic, a further rule devoices fricatives
at the end of a word, thus /z/ > /s/ finally, suggesting that they
were still voiced and voiceless versions of the same consonant sound.
So it seems a reasonable assumption that Proto-Germanic /z/ was
indeed a voiced alveolar fricative.

We also know that in Old Norse the sound merged with /r/, a short
alveolar trill or flap, as in Scottish English. So presumably it went
through some intermediate stage between /z/ and /r/, perhaps somewhere
along the way rather like the Czech 'ř' (if this letter doesn't
display properly, it's the rightmost letter on the bottom row here:
http://czech.typeit.org/ ). As in Czech, it probably had a voiceless
allophone after voiceless consonants, as in 'fiskR' in the Eggjum
stone inscription.

Further clues come from the effect the sound had on neighboring
vowels. /i/ and /u/ were sometimes lowered to /e/ and /o/
respectively. This may be a very early change, as it is also found in
Old English. On the other hand, it could have happened independently
in North Germanic and Proto-Old English. The lowering of high vowels
suggests that the sound already had some of the qualities of [r] at
that time (whenever it was), as this is a common effect of [r] with
parallels in many languages. The sound derived from Proto-Germanic
/z/ also had a tendency to turn back vowels into front vowels in Old
Norse, e.g. Proto-Norse *kúz > Old Norse 'kýr' "cow". The same
changes happened when /i/ or /j/ followed in the next syllable, which
might imply that /z/ ('R') shared some quality in common with these
sounds at some time in its development. I'm not an expert in the
relative dating of all of these changes, but I think the fronting of
vowels happened in what's known as Transitional Norse, c. 500-700,
long before the language came to be written down in manuscripts using
the Roman alphabet.

*

Coincidentally, medieval scribes in Iceland used capital letters for a
quite different purpose: to represent double consonants, e.g. aNaR
'annarr' "other"; heRa 'herra' "lord". The scribes also used the
Roman letter 'z' as an abbreviation for /ts/, e.g. 'veizla' "feast"
(pronounced /veitsla/ in medieval times), 'vaz' (pronounced /vatz/) =
'vatns' "of water".

LN