Talk:Old Norse orthography

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Latin-Only
I noticed this article only deals with Latin orthography of Old Norse. Should it remain that way, or should it include information on Runic orthography as well? LokiClock (talk) 18:58, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
 * No response, but I doubt there will be any complaints, so I've restructured the sectioning a bit to invite the discussion of runic orthography. LokiClock (talk) 03:01, 7 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I have added vowel tables for Latin and runic systems. The data was assembled by copying existing information from Old Norse and the individual runes' articles, with some corrections and dropping of spellings reflecting mergers. Associating a phoneme with a spelling of the sound it merged with is misleading. There was a comment I read about Old Swedish actually changing their spelling to reflect monopthongization before it actually took place, due to Danish influence. If someone can find a source for this, one that specifies which system(s) this applies to, then such spellings should be added in with the relevant historical note. Obviously, sources still need to be supplied for the runes. Otherwise, some diversity of the Latin orthography, including period-specific conventions, is not represented, and if sources can be found that indicate that certain spellings are more specific to a dialect than not, that should be indicated as well. LokiClock (talk) 18:13, 7 February 2010 (UTC)

Usage: Ǫ or Ö?
On the discussion page for Ragnarök, Haukurth mentioned that there had been a discussion on using ö for o-ogonek on wikipedia. I hope I'm not breaking some consensus reached in that discussion when I replace ö with o-ogonek in this article (where appropriate). I know the o-ogonek doesn't always show up on computer screens, but I think, particularly in an article about orthography, that it should be used, as it is the character which is used in the standardised old norse orthography. --Barend 10:47, 15 July 2006 (UTC)


 * Back when I wrote the first version of this article we couldn't even use o-ogonek in article titles because Wikipedia was using Latin-1. Now we're using UTF-8 and unusual characters are slowly becoming more generally available but using o-ogonek is still cumbersome and requires the "unicode" template if most of our readers are to see it. As you say it's appropriate to discuss it and display it in an article about orthography, but generally I think 'ö' will serve us well for some years to come. It's common enough in printed books, especially older ones. Haukur 11:18, 15 July 2006 (UTC)

he orthography of the Old Norse language since the introduction of the Latin alphabet in Iceland is a thorny subject. <--- best line EVER.

Ø in Old Norse.
Ø was used in Old Norse, is used in Icelandic.

What did Icelandic use to replace Ø in Old Norse?

Or did Ö in Icelandic replace both Ǫ and Ø in Old Norse?

20:35, 26 December 2007 Myusanem (Talk | contribs)


 * The Old Norse <ø> and  sounds merged in modern Icelandic into the same sound, which is orthographically represented as <ö>. Its phonetic value is pretty much the same as old Norse (and for that matter, modern Norwegian) <ø>.--Barend (talk) 12:55, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

It also unrounded sometimes, e.g. kømr > modern Icelandic kemur. I don't know what the conditioning environment is. Rhyolite (talk) 21:15, 2 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Old Norse had both kømr and kemr, so this is probably not a case of kømr developing into kemur after all.--Barend (talk) 22:48, 4 June 2008 (UTC)


 * My impression was that kømr is the older form and that this is indeed an example of the ø>e change. But I don't have a reference handy. Haukur (talk) 23:30, 4 June 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, that is probably right. What I meant to say was that the change from kømr to kemr came in the "common Old Norse" period, so to speak, i.e. also in Norwegian (nynorsk "kjem", although some dialects in Sunnmøre, "kjøm"), so it's not a particularly Icelandic development from kømr to kemur.--Barend (talk) 23:35, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Why Ǫ and ą?
If I understand correctly, the sound for 'Ǫ' is the swedish Specific 'a'.

To me, all that ö, æ, oe-letter, ø, Ǫ and even ą are a huge cancer. How did 'ą' appear in the transcription of younger futhark? Does it even exist in the latin form of any non-slavic/baltic language? Not to mention that in Icelandic, æ is pronounced more like "ei" in Norwegian or German, the 'oe-symbol' has been replaced by ø in Norwegian (even though they don't correspond to the same sound?)

Is it related to all the weird letter cancer that makes Lithuanian text look like a cryptograph rather than human-readable text? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.220.110.47 (talk) 18:17, 23 May 2018 (UTC)

Problem with fonts in iOS Safari, seen in Latin orthography table
In the ‘consonants’ table of ON Latin-based orthography, the second entry on the line beginning with l - “ꝇ” - is rendered in Safari iOS as some replacement character / rectangular symbol meaning unsupported. Could someone tell me what that is?CecilWard (talk) 15:23, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

Apostophe r
OED 1893 sv "cop sb. 2" in the etymology mentions "a[fter] O[ld]N[orse] kopp’r". This kopp’r would seem to correspond to koppr in normalized Old Norse spelling and koppur in modern Icelandic spelling. So was this apostrophe a feature of medieval manuscripts, or later normalization of medieval texts, or later Icelandic writing? It must have had some currency to make it into the OED. jnestorius(talk) 11:23, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

Proto-Norse
The language form found in inscriptions from c. 200–300 is radically different from Old Norse and much more archaic. It is conventionally called Proto-Norse, not Old Norse, which only starts to appear in the 8th century. I've fixed that in the article. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 05:13, 4 February 2024 (UTC)