{"id":551,"date":"2011-10-10T17:26:12","date_gmt":"2011-10-11T00:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=551"},"modified":"2011-10-10T17:24:59","modified_gmt":"2011-10-11T00:24:59","slug":"younger-futhark-800-ad-scandinavia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/10\/10\/younger-futhark-800-ad-scandinavia\/","title":{"rendered":"Younger Futhark — 800 AD, Scandinavia"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Younger Futhark character for Golden Year 18.<\/p><\/div>\n

Elder Futhark<\/a> evolved into Younger Futhark, with the transition happening between 650 AD and 800 AD.\u00a0 Younger Futhark was most different from Elder Futhark in the number of characters: Younger Futhark had only two-thirds as many letters as Elder Futhark.\u00a0 You might think that this was because the language simplified, and there weren’t as many sounds in Norse during the Younger Futhark period.\u00a0 You might be wrong, however.\u00a0 Linguists believe that the number of sounds in the spoken language actually increased<\/em> over the transition period.<\/p>\n

Archeologists also believe that literacy significantly increased during this period.\u00a0 Maybe the new learners were lazy; maybe as time went on, people discovered that you could still read things even without as many characters as the language needed.\u00a0 I don’t know.<\/p>\n

One common use of this writing system was to keep track of the Christian calendar, which uses the 19-year Metonic cycle<\/a> of “golden years”.\u00a0 They used one Younger Futhark character for each of the years, which meant that they were three characters short.\u00a0 To handle that, they invented three characters which were only used to represent those three years’ numbers.<\/p>\n

Futhark was written in all kinds of ways.\u00a0 In addition to left-to-right, right-to-left, and boustrophedon, the writing also frequently followed the outlines of the object that it was inscribed upon.<\/p>\n

Younger Futhark had two styles: the long-branch (or Danish) and short-twig (or Swedish\/Norwegian) versions.\u00a0 Like the names suggest, the short-twig version had shorter and\/or more abbreviated strokes.<\/p>\n

A variant, used in a area of Sweden between the 10th and 12th century, called H\u00e4lsinge Runes took this to extremes.\u00a0 In these runes, the vertical bar was completely removed from most glyphs, leaving very short lines to represent the runes.\u00a0 It might be that H\u00e4lsinge Runes were the very first shorthand<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia (Younger Futhark)<\/a>, Ancient Scripts<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a>, Wikipedia (H\u00e4lsinge Runes)<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Elder Futhark evolved into Younger Futhark, with the transition happening between 650 AD and 800 AD.\u00a0 Younger Futhark was most different from Elder Futhark in the number of characters: Younger Futhark had only two-thirds as many letters as Elder Futhark.\u00a0 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,21,28],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alphabet","category-evolved-from-parent","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}