The Northern Italic alphabet is usually quoted as a candidate for the origin of the runes. However, other letters seem to be independent. There are some similarities to alphabets of Phoenician origin (Latin, Greek, Italic) that cannot possibly all be due to chance: ᚠ - F, ᚢ - V, ᚱ - R, ᚲ - C or K, ᚺ - H, ᛁ - I, ᛊ - S, ᛏ - T, ᛒ - B, ᛗ - M, ᛚ - Λ, ᛞ - Δ, ᛟ - Ω. The runes developed comparatively late, centuries after the Central European alphabets from which they are probably descended. No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn, On that tree of which no man knows from where its roots run Á þeim meiði er manngi veit hvers af rótum renn. The text (in New Icelandic and in English translation) is as follows:

In Norse mythology, the invention of runes is attributed to Odin: The Havamal (stanzas 138, 139) describes how Odin receives the rune through his self- sacrifice. also the chapters of the Kalevala, called runo, plural runot, a loan from North Germanic). The name is from a root run- (Gothic runa) meaning 'secret' (c.f. The name given to the signs, contrasting them with Latin or Greek letters, is attested on a 6th century alamannic runestaff as runa, and possibly as runo on the Einang stone (ca. Later, this disadvantage was partly eliminated in the dotted runes of Dalecarlia (see below). For example, voiced and unvoiced consonants merged in script, and so did many vowels. The development here might seem rather astonishing, since the younger form of the alphabet came to use the same few runes to express an unusually great number of different phonemes that the older version had distinguished clearly. However, the fact that the younger Futhark has sixteen runes, while the Elder Futhark has twenty four, is not fully explained by the some six hundred years of sound changes that had occurred in the North Germanic language group. Thus, the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc has several runes peculiar unto itself to represent diphthongs unique to (or at least prevalent in) the Anglo-Saxon dialect. No distinction is made in surviving runic inscriptions between long and short vowels, although such a distinction was certainly present phonologically in the spoken languages of the time.Īs Proto-Germanic evolved into its later language groups, the words assigned to the runes and the sounds represented by the runes themselves began to diverge somewhat, and each culture would either create new runes, rename or rearrange its rune names slightly, or even stop using obsolete runes completely, to accommodate these changes. Most of the early runes from the Scandinavian countries are assumed to be in the Proto-Norse, the common ancestor language of the modern North Germanic languages.

North Germanic, West Germanic and East Germanic. While at this time the Germanic language was certainly not at the Proto-Germanic stage any longer, it may still have been a continuum of dialects not yet clearly separated into the three branches of later centuries, viz. They where dated to the kimber-time, 120 before Chr.). a short time ago helmets where found, one of them with runes. The runes were introduced to, or invented by, the Germanic peoples in roughly the 2nd century(edit:?. Younger Futhark inscription on the Rök Stone

Elder futhark runes unicode