The accute accents used in modern editions of Old Norse texts and grammars indicate vowel length, not stress (although it happens that unstressed vowels were never long). Medieval scribes tended not to mark long vowels consistently, but there's usually little doubt among modern scholars as to which vowels were long. This is because long and short vowels underwent different changes in their later development, so it's possible to work out which were long in Old Norse from their pronunciation in Modern Icelandic and other Scandinavian languages. Another technique is to compare cognate words in other Germanic languages. Yet another is to see how words are used in verse; the skaldic meters especially have very strict rules, some of which specify where syllables can occur according to their length; and there are rules of rhyme and half-rhyme that allow us to compare vowels. We also have very valuable evidence in the form of a 12th century document called The First Grammatical Treatise, which describes the Icelandic phonetic system in remarkable detail.

The younger futhark (Viking Age runes) is an ambiguous writing system in many ways. Not only is vowel quantity (length) not marked, but vowels of several different qualities could be written with the same letter. In some systems, voiced stops weren't distinguished from voiceless stops. How will someone know if they're saying the word correctly? Often they won't know! In the era when the inscriptions were made, when people spoke the language, they'd know they were pronouncing a word right if they guessed rightly which word was intended, just as someone reading Arabic or Hebrew has to supply the vowels from their own knowledge. But there would still have been ambiguities. Although there are vowels in the futhark, there was no one fixed convention for how to spell words. Nowadays, we have to guess as best we can at what the writers meant.

The elder futhark (from before the Viking Age) had more letters, and the language at that time is thought to have been phonologically simpler; in particular, it had a smaller range of vowels. Even so, vowel length wasn't marked then either, just as it wasn't in other European alphabets of the era.

Regarding stress, this was never a problem, as it was always fixed on the first syllable of a word. So the stress of Old Norse words doesn't vary through the paradigm as it can in Russian.

--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, "Schuyler Himberg" <schuylerhimberg@...> wrote:
>
> Lately I have been interested in studying the runic alphabet Futhark; therefore I am. Only now have I come across the problem that the runic letters (I guess one could call them letters or symbols) don’t show if a word is stressed by an accent mark. I know that not having an accent won’t change the word much (at least I think it won’t change the word much. Eg. In Russian the work myaka is totally different from the word myáka.) Any way, I was only asking if anyone can help me by explaining how someone reading a word in Futhark will know if they are saying the word correctly by putting emphasis on a letter. An exemplar would be if you read the word álfr in Futhark. You would not know if there was stress in the “a”. It would be very helpful if my query was answered.
> Thank you
> Kveðja,
> Mr.Himberg
>