Talk:Eihwaz

ē2

The vowel usually transcribed *ē₂ in reconstructions of Proto-Germanic isn't the vowel that came from PIE *ei and later merged with *ī. *ē₂ doesn't have a clear-cut PIE ancestor, but in PGmc it's found in the 3rd principal part (preterite plural) of strong verbs of the 4th and 5th conjugation class (see Germanic strong verb), in the 2nd and 3rd principal parts (preterite singular and plural) of 7th conjugation verbs after reduplication is lost, and in a few other cases like the word for here. I have no idea if that vowel is ever written with eihwaz. —Angr/talk 19:00, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

Pronunciation

How would this generally have been pronounced? I've not been able to figure this out, and I'm not sure if it would be appropriate in, say, the name "Neil", as even though it is the correct letter, I'm not sure if it has the correct sound. Klomag (talk) 03:33, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

We don't really know -- it seems to be actually redundant in the runic writing systems where it occurs, and most of what is presented in the article was extrapolated and reconstructed from the occurrence of the word "Eoh" in Old English. AnonMoos (talk) 11:40, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

the only thing we can be sure of is that pronunciation changed over time. In Old English, the pronunciation was /e:o/. In Proto-Norse or late Proto-Germanic, the value may have been /æ:/ or similar. The important thing is not the precise phonetical value (which will have varied dialectally anyway), but the phonological value, which was "the long vowel formerly known as /ei/". --dab (𒁳) 16:55, 15 April 2008 (UTC)

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From everything I have seen, it is pronounced ee-oo (long 'e' and long 'u'), rhyming with 'e' and 'oo' in 'me too'.

Thibeinn (talk) 19:16, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

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About the Changes I made

1) Ēoh was sometimes a phoneme in the range of /x/ to /ç/. This can be seen on the Ruthwell Cross, Great Urswick Stone, and on some coins (where the moneyer's name is sometimes written ᚹᛁᛇᛏᚱᛖᛞ and sometimes written VIHᛏRED). I made the article reflect this.

2) I've seen Ēoh transcribed as ï and ʒ in scholarly works, but never as eo. I made the article reflect this.

3) I don't think Ēoh made /eːo/. I've read scholars pondering what vowel it was, but I've never seen any definitively say it was /eːo/. In fact, /eːo/ hardly makes sense as a possible value. Take sïþæbæd (Loveden Hill Urn) and jïslheard (Dover Stone) for examples: in those words Ēoh makes sense as /iː/, but /eːo/ is a stretch. There's also eateïnne (Thornhill Stone 2) wherein Ēoh might be a consonant, but if it was meant as a vowel we can rule out /eːo/ as its sound there.

I'd also like to point out that the combination ᛖᚩ appears fairly often (relative to futhorc's small corpus). It appears on the Kirkheaton Stone (ᛖᚩᚻ), on the Monkwearmouth Stone 2 (ᛖᚩ), and in the Monte Sant'Angelo Graffiti (ᛚᛖᚩᚠᚹᛁᚾᛁ). ᛖᚩ might appear on the Brandon Antler (ᛞᛖᚩᚱᚫ), and possibly on the Falstone Stone (ᛖᚩᛗᚫᚱ). If ᛇ made /eːo/, why did people seem to only use ᛖᚩ for it? One can find alternatives to ᛠ in futhorc (like ᚫᚪ and ᛖᚪ), but the Ear rune was a later addition to futhorc, and that could explain why some didn't use it. Ēoh on the other hand is an original rune. I think the idea that Ēoh made /eːo/ comes from the surviving copy of the rune poem, but Codex Vindobonensis 795 gives the rune's value as "i & h", which matches what we find epigraphically.

4) I deleted a paragraph of unscholarly, New Age fluff about this rune supposedly being linked to Yggdrasil. Hurlebatte (talk) 07:15, 24 October 2019 (UTC)