Wynn
Encyclopedia
Old English alphabet
Old English alphabet may refer to* Anglo-Saxon runes , a runic alphabet used to write Old English from the 5th century* Old English Latin alphabet, a Latin-derived alphabet used to write Old English from the 9th to the 12th centuries...
, where it is used to represent the sound /w/.
While the earliest Old English
Old English language
Old English or Anglo-Saxon is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons and their descendants in parts of what are now England and southeastern Scotland between at least the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century...
texts represent this phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
with the digraph
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
Middle English
Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
period, circa 1300 (Freeborn 1992:25). It was replaced with
W
W is the 23rd letter in the basic modern Latin alphabet.In other Germanic languages, including German, its pronunciation is similar or identical to that of English V...
> developed.
The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss" known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poem
Rune poem
The Rune Poems are three poems that list the letters of runic alphabets while providing an explanatory poetic stanza for each letter. Three different poems have been preserved: the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, the Norwegian Rune Poem, and the Icelandic Rune Poem.The Icelandic and Norwegian poems list 16...
:
- Bliss he enjoys who knows not pain,
- sorrow nor anxiety, and himself has
- prosperity and bliss and a good enough house.
It is not continued in the Younger Futhark
Younger Futhark
The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a runic alphabet, a reduced form of the Elder Futhark, consisting of only 16 characters, in use from ca. 800 CE...
, but in the Gothic alphabet
Gothic alphabet
The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language, created in the 4th century by Ulfilas for the purpose of translating the Christian Bible....
, the letter w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic language
Proto-Germanic , or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the unattested, reconstructed proto-language of all the Germanic languages, such as modern English, Frisian, Dutch, Afrikaans, German, Luxembourgish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and Swedish.The Proto-Germanic language is...
reconstruction of the rune's name as *wunjô "joy".
It is one of the two runes
Runic alphabet
The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using letters known as runes to write various Germanic languages before the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter...
(along with þ
Thorn (letter)
Thorn or þorn , is a letter in the Old English, Old Norse, and Icelandic alphabets, as well as some dialects of Middle English. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th. The letter originated from the rune in the Elder Fuþark, called thorn in the...
) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet
English alphabet
The modern English alphabet is a Latin alphabet consisting of 26 letters and 2 ligatures – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet:...
(or any extension of the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
). A modified version of the letter called Vend
Vend (letter)
Vend is a letter of Old Norse. It was used to represent the sounds , , and .It was related to and probably derived from the Old English letter Wynn , except that the bowl was open on the top, not being connected to the stem, which made it somewhat resemble a letter Y...
was used briefly in Old Norse
Old Norse
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
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
P
P is the sixteenth letter of the basic modern Latin alphabet.-Usage:In English and most other European languages, P is a voiceless bilabial plosive. Both initial and final Ps can be combined with many other discrete consonants in English words...
.
in Unicode and HTML Entities
| Latin Capital Letter Wynn | Ƿ | U+01F7 and Ƿ |
| Latin Letter Wynn | ƿ | U+01BF and ƿ |
| Runic Letter Wynn | U+16B9 and ᚹ | |
| Latin Capital Letter Vend | Ꝩ | U+A768 and Ꝩ |
| Latin Small Letter Vend | ꝩ | U+A769 and ꝩ |