Again the West Saxons initially preferred the character derived from a rune, and the Angles/Engle preferred the Latin-derived lettering VV, consistent with the thorn versus eth usage pattern.Įxcept in manuscripts, runic letters were an Anglian phenomenon. W was occasionally rendered VV (later UU), but the runic character wynn (Ƿ or ƿ) was a common way of writing the /w/ sound. The era pre-dates the emergence of some forms of writing accepted today notably rare were lower case characters, and the letters W and U. The character ⁊ ( Tironian et) was used as the ampersand (&) in contemporary Anglo-Saxon writings. Separate letters th were preferred in the earliest period in Northern texts, and returned to dominate by the Middle English period onward. Thorn tended to be more used in the south (Wessex) and eth in the North (Mercia and Northumbria). They were used indiscriminately for voiced and unvoiced ⟨th⟩ sounds, unlike in modern Icelandic. Among these are the preference between the runic character thorn (Þ, lower-case þ, from the rune of the same name) and the letter eth (Ð or ð), both of which are equivalent to modern ⟨th⟩ and were interchangeable. A number of variations of the details below exist. This was a period in which spellings varied widely, even within a document. ![]() The names are given in modern English form followed by the names and titles (as far as is known) in contemporary Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and Latin, the prevalent languages of record at the time in England. While the details of the later monarchs are confirmed by a number of sources, the earlier ones are in many cases obscure. For later monarchs, see the List of English monarchs. This is a list of monarchs of Wessex until AD 886.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |