Wynn
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| Name | Proto-Germanic | Old English | |
| *Wunjō | Wynn | ||
| "joy" | |||
| Shape | Elder Futhark | Futhorc | |
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| Unicode | ᚹ
U+16B9
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| Transliteration | w | ||
| Transcription | w | ||
| IPA | [w] | ||
| Position in rune-row | 8 | ||
Wynn (Ƿ ƿ) (also spelled wen, ƿynn, or ƿen) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound /w/.
While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph <uu>, scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn (ᚹ) for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use (perhaps under the influence of French orthography) during the Middle English period, circa 1300.[1] It was replaced with <uu> once again, from which the modern <w> developed.
The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss" known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poem[2]
- ᚹ Ƿenne bruceþ, ðe can ƿeana lyt
sares and sorge and him sylfa hæf
blæd and blysse and eac byrga geniht. [Lines 22-24 in The Anglo-Saxon Runic Poem]
- Who uses it knows no pain,
- sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself has
- prosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter. [Translation slightly modified from Dickins (1915)]
It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, but in the Gothic alphabet, the letter 𐍅 w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic reconstruction of the rune's name as *wunjô "joy".
It is one of the two runes (along with þ) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet (or any extension of the Latin alphabet). A modified version of the letter ƿynn called Vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/.
As with þ, ƿynn was revived in modern times for the printing of Old English texts, but since the early 20th century the usual practice has been to substitute the modern <w> instead due to ƿynn's visual resemblance to P.
Wynn in Unicode and HTML Entities [edit]
- U+01F7 Ƿ latin capital letter wynn (HTML:
Ƿ) - U+01BF ƿ latin letter wynn (HTML:
ƿ) - U+16B9 ᚹ runic letter wunjo wynn w (HTML:
ᚹ) - U+A768 Ꝩ latin capital letter vend (HTML:
Ꝩ) - U+A769 ꝩ latin small letter vend (HTML:
ꝩ) - "Unicode character search". Retrieved 2012-04-28.
References [edit]
See also [edit]
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