Old Norse beginner - can you check my work?

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corpuschain
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Old Norse beginner - can you check my work?

Postby corpuschain » Sun Nov 06, 2022 10:16 pm

Hey folks,
My partner and I are trying to learn Norse as well as use it on an inscription on our wedding rings.

Does this work? The names are just translated letter by letter (except for v, which my partner said doesn't exist in Old Norse.

ᛞᛖᚠᛟᚾ᛫ᛒᛅᛏᚱᚬᚦᛅᛏ᛫ᛏᛖᛋᛋᚨ.᛫ᛚᚬᚠᛅ᛫ᛅᛚᚠᛅᚢᛋ᛫

and

ᛏᛖᛋᛋᚨ ᛫ᛒᛅᛏᚱᚬᚦᛅᛏ᛫ᛞᛖᚠᛟᚾ᛫ᛚᚬᚠᛅ᛫ᛅᛚᚠᛅᚢᛋ᛫

It translates to

Devon betrothed Tessa love always

And on the other ring

Tessa betrothed Devon love always
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Iversen
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Re: Old Norse beginner - can you check my work?

Postby Iversen » Mon Nov 07, 2022 12:08 am

I have never bothered to learn the runic alphabets so I stuffed the two sentences into the runic translator at lingo jam and got the following:

Defon᛫baetrᚬᚦaet᛫tessa.᛫lᚬfae᛫aelfaeus᛫
Tessa ᛫baetrᚬᚦaet᛫defon᛫lᚬfae᛫aelfaeus᛫

The sign ᚬ should be some kind of a (there is another a too), and you might have expected ᛟ for o as in the elder futhark, but that letter for some reason disppeared from the younger one. The word 'baetrᚬᚦaet' must be the same that becomes 'betrothed' in modern English, and 'aelfaeus' looks like a forerunner of "always". I looked both up in the wordlist at the end of my Wimmer's Oldnordisk Læsebog and didn't find any of them, and I also tried to look the words up in the dictionary of old-norse.net, but to no avail. However in Modern Icelandic you would expect something like "Devon trúlofaðist/unnusti Tessu - ást/kærleikur alltaf" resp. "Tessa trúlofaðist Devon - ást alltaf" - which doesn't look anything like your sentences.

Then I got the idea that you might have tried to transcribe two Anglosaxon sentences, and I used a translator plus the Wiktionary etymologies in Google to check this hypothesis. And 'love' became 'lufu' (with an f), the etymology of 'betroth' became "a combination of bi-, or "thoroughly," and treowðe, the Old English word for "truth, a pledge.", whereas 'aelfaeus' seemed just to go back to Middle English - although there are some related words with "eal.." in Anglosaxon. Close, but not close enough.

So now I'm quite curious as to how you arrived at the sentences you tried to transcribe as runes...
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Re: Old Norse beginner - can you check my work?

Postby avalon » Mon Nov 07, 2022 11:31 pm

Looks to me that your attempts are not in Old Norse at all, but simply English words written in runes.

I'm a beginner in Old Norse as well, so I will not attempt a translation. My recommendation is to 1) post in the Old Norse subreddit and hope someone with real skills responds, or 2) pay actual money (this is for something permanent, after all!) to Old Norse expert Dr. Jackson Crawford to provide a translation you can trust. (Disclaimer: Crawford used to provide this service; not sure if he still does.)
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