[Main Blog Post] Eirik Westcoat and the American Futharch

[jprussell]

Eirik Westcoat is the modern poet from whom I have learned to craft verse in Germanish meters, and he has constructed a new set of Runestaves fitted to the sounds of modern English. Along the way to explaining why he did that, though, he just happened to drop a remarkable insight into one of the mysteries of Runic scholarship.

Comments

[k_a_nitz]

Fascinating, though I have to say his American English sounds seem quite different from modern NZ English if some of the alliteration is anything to go by! It also makes me wonder why the Germans never came up with a new rune poem for the Armanen runes - I suspect the connection was missed primarily because the Elder Futhark was missing a surviving rune poem (which presumably would have made the connection more obvious).

[k_a_nitz]

Thataway is the one that took me back a bit. In NZ we generally pronounce it these days more like 'zataway' with a voiced th as in the, or as is now quite common exactly like a z so the is pronounced like za with a very short z, whereas thence and thither (from the line in the poem) are the same th as in thorn. So by the looks of the rune poem, thence and thither are pronounced in America more like the th in the, ie voiced?

[jprussell]

That's correct (I had been wondering which alliterations you were noticing) - thence and thither are both voiced in most American dialects (I think one of his subpages talks a bit about dialectical variation within America). For what it's worth, in various less-formal/more slangy dialects, you sometimes get voiced /th/ -> /z/ and unvoiced /th/ -> /d/. Example's include "Howzat?" ("how's that?") and "who dis?" ("Who's this?"), but these are universally heard as uneducated/informal and/or associated with various ethnic accents.

[jprussell]

That's an interesting question I hadn't considered. Off the top of my head, I might guess it's at least partly because I have the impression List and his followers were looking at the Runes more as "symbols" and less as "letters" - more concerned with their name and meaning, less with what sounds they represented in writing. And as you said, the lack of an intact Elder Futhark Rune Poem likely has something to do with it too.