Welcome to Rune School! Skip ahead if you’re ready to learn.
An alphabet is a tool for communucation. We write down the sounds of our speech, another person reads what we have written and can sound out what we have “said”.
With alphabets, we can “speak” over far distances and into the future. There is no other tool that has had more impact on the world.
Now, the original idea of an alphabet is simple; like a hammer. But today with English, the way that we use the alphabet (how we spell) has become something complicated; like a large factory machine for which we have lost the instructions.
“Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.” ― Mark Twain
Anyone can learn to use a hammer. But learning to use a complicated machine takes time and effort that feels pointless. Why not just pick up a hammer?
So what is an English speaker to do?
Fix our current Latin alphabet spelling? The amount of proposals to do so are countless. Ultimately, it would take a united effort of all English-speaking nations to enforce such a proposal. Even if that happened, would the people accept it? When you spell words a certain way your whole life, the words are like childhood friends. A government requiring you to change your spelling later in life is like killing your old friends!
You could start using your preferred spelling change today, but it would be percieved by others as spelling mistakes. In order to be able to adopt a new spelling system and avoid the confusion with the current spelling system, a new alphabet (script) is needed.
Such a new alphabet, tailor-made for English, could exist alongside our traditional Latin alphabet as a simple tool for clear and easy communication. A new spelling of a word wouldn’t feel like killing an old friend, but rather like making a new friend! The only problem is, if an alphabet can be created arbitrarily, it can be changed arbitrarily. It has no tie to history to make it feel concrete. Who is to decide which letter shape is better than another? A logical system could always be made more logical. (That is my experience with Shavian. It’s an otherwise great script that you can learn on my other website Shavian.School.)
Could we adopt a foreign alphabet like Cyrillic or Greek? We would be in the same spot we’re in with the Latin alphabet. It’s not made for English. And the fact that it lacks a proper tie to history makes it, again, feel arbitrary.
So we need a solution that has:
The Anglo-Saxon Futhorc provides such a solution.
English used to use these runes. So the sounds and designs of the runes are not totally arbitrary. And yet, the runes are new to people today, freeing us to spell in a way that is connected with speech.
Is it possible to return to using runes? Yes!
The runic system taught in this course, originally based on Rune Revival, is respectful and authentic to the history of the English language itself. But more importantly, it works. It even works with all English accents.
If you know the English language, you can complete this brief course. It doesn’t matter which English accent you have. I will specify major accent differences with flag emojis in this course: 🇺🇸 🇬🇧.
Join the Discord server if you have questions, feedback, or want to practice!
Let’s look closer at the runes themselves to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with:
Thematically, you can notice some common patterns among how they look. Don’t worry about the sounds they make yet. Just look below and notice the lines and shapes of them.
Are you feeling comfy? Good. Let’s go.