Rune School Spelling Updates

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Rune School is branching off from the (excellent) Rune Revival spelling system and updating it based on their own experience and learnings.

Why

A couple of things inspired this:

  1. A reddit comment about how doubled vowels are attested in the futhorc corpus

  2. A user complaint about the word unknown in runes: ᚪᚾᚾᚾᚩᚢᚾ

I had been playing around with my own changes to the spelling system for a long time, but I wasn’t ready to show anything yet.

The goals of the spelling changes are twofold.

  1. Align vowels to better match the organization explained by Dr Geoff Lindsey

  2. Drastically reduce the amount of doubling of runes

So much is owed to Rune Revival and it is not this author’s desire to break away and never return. That is why I consider these changes a “branch”. The changes are really not so significant and it is my desire to continue working together and maybe merge together again in the future.

Lindsey Vowels

What I call the “Lindsey Vowels” are below:

You can see a similar chart in Labov’s Atlas of North American English. Dr Geoff Lindsey did not invent this organization of vowels.

You can see that the overall grouping of vowels is “lax checked” or short (red), “linking r” or lengthened vowels (yellow), and closing diphthong (sea green).

Based on his chart, I have created my own chart to suit our needs a bit better.

You can see that I have tried to show a bit more cleanly not just the groupings of vowels, but also the relationships across groupings. This allows us to use the same runes across the groupings in predictable ways that will feel intuitive to the user.

We can get more mileage from fewer letters by using this system. It’ll also feel like less work by having predictable patterns across and within categories.

Remove consonant doubling

Consonant doubling was not working for me. English has short vowels far more frequently than lengthened vowels and thus the doubled consonants were too frequent.

On top of that, there were so many consonants that potentially needed to be doubled (16), it was very inefficient.

Overall, the consonant doubling system was a holdover from previous latin spelling conventions and just didn’t make sense for our needs.

Introduce vowel doubling

Vowel doubling should be done to indicate a lengthened vowel, which is fairly rare in English.

Vowel doubling is about as equally attested in Runes as consonant doubling.

See further posts for how these changes can be manifested.

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