(Message inbox:6) Received: from SOUTH-STATION-ANNEX.MIT.EDU by po8.MIT.EDU (5.61/4.7) id AA06845; Fri, 26 Sep 97 01:29:59 EDT Received: from orbitor.ica.net by MIT.EDU with SMTP id AA21474; Fri, 26 Sep 97 01:29:53 EDT Received: from [207.245.215.30] by orbitor (NTMail 3.02.13) with ESMTP id na679783 for ; Fri, 26 Sep 1997 01:29:47 -0400 Message-Id: <1.5.4.16.19970926012813.2c8f75ae@ica.net> X-Sender: runesmith@ica.net X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Light Version 1.5.4 (16) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: Jerrad Pierce From: Jennifer Smith Subject: Re: oh... Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 01:29:47 -0400 X-Info: Greetings from Canada On-Line - http://www.ica.net/ At 05:49 PM 25/09/97 EDT, you wrote: >To make a best fit for a figlet font... as it stands now I'm using elder >futhark, but it lacks letters, numbers (I'd herard they used letters as numbers? Yes, but that was a lot later (ie. 12th century or so). I don't know a whole lot about it, but apparently they used f for 1, u for 2, th for 3, etc. >what would be wrong with taking your seemingly 1:1 listing and making it into >a font set? Nothing at all, except that you might also want to make some arrangement to include special characters for thurisaz (th) and inguz (ng). And mine isn't exactly 1:1 - note that there are several letters that will produce 'kenaz', for example. But that's how my rune font works, and it's quite practical. >alsi I noticed across various sites that claimed to be about futhark different >symbols with the same name. Some differingly slightly ie; >< vs > > > < for J J was one rune that did have several variations in the original Elder futhark. Another was S. >and some others very different. Such as putting dots in the rings of B to make >P... That's from the Younger futhark, specifically the Dotted futhark (10th century?). They did that because the original Younger futhark was so short that each rune had to represent several sounds (the same one for B and P, the same for K and G, etc.). This made it simple to write, but a real pain to read. So they started making modifications to some runes, mostly by way of dots, to distinguish between the sounds. Thus the dotted B. It was actually a rather advanced bit of phoenetics, since the sounds that got combined tended to be the voiced and unvoiced versions of the same sound. BTW, there is another variation you might see for inguz. It was originally a diamond shape, but in the A.S. futhark they added extra lines so it looked like two X's on top of one another. Unfortunately, Ralph Blum stuck that form in the middle of an otherwise Elder futhark in his book and on his clay runes, and people have been copying the mistake ever since. ************************************* "And it's a heave ho, high ho, coming down the plains Stealing wheat and barley and all the other grains And it's a ho hey, high hey, farmers bar your doors When you see the Jolly Roger on Regina's mighty shores!" '************************************* Jennifer Smith - Tara Hill Designs P.O. Box 23074, 55 Ontario St. S., Milton, ON Canada L9T 5B4 runesmith@ica.net http://www2.ica.net/~runesmith