> But it ever occurs at the beginning of
> a word.

Oopsh, I meant to type: "never occurs at the beginning of a word" !!

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "llama_nom" <600cell@...> wrote:
>
> --- 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
>