[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]

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.