Wynn

Wynn or wyn[1] (Ƿ ƿ; also spelled wen, win, ƿynn, ƿen, and ƿin) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound /w/.

Ƿ
Ƿ ƿ
(See below)
Writing cursive forms of Ƿ
Usage
Writing systemFuthorc
TypeAlphabetic and Logographic
Language of originOld English
Phonetic usage[w]
/wɪn/
Unicode codepointU+01F7, U+01BF
History
Development
  • Ƿ ƿ
Time period~700 to ~1100
DescendantsꝨ ꝩ
SistersNone
Transliteration equivalentsw
Variations(See below)
Other
Other letters commonly used withw
Writing directionLeft-to-right
NameProto-GermanicOld English
*WunjōWynn
"joy"
ShapeElder FutharkFuthorc
Unicode
U+16B9
Transliterationw
Transcriptionw
IPA[w]
Position in
rune-row
8
Wynn in the Hildebrandslied manuscript (830s): the text reads ƿiges ƿarne.
Capital wynn appears twice in this 10th century inscription in Breamore: her sƿutelað seo gecƿydrædnes ðe

History

The letter "W"

While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph uu, scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use during the Middle English period, circa 1300.[2] In post-wynn texts it was sometimes replaced with u but often replaced with a ligature form of uu, from which the modern letter w developed.

Meaning

The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss" known from the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poems:[3]

Ƿenne brūceþ, þe can ƿēana lẏt
sāres and sorge and him sẏlfa hæf
blǣd and blẏsse and eac bẏrga geniht.

Lines 22–24 in The Anglo-Saxon Runic Poem

Who uses it knows no pain,
sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself has
prosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter

Translation slightly modified from Dickins (1915)

Miscellaneous

It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, but in the Gothic alphabet the letter 𐍅 w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic reconstruction of the rune's name as *wunjô "joy".

It is one of the two runes (along with þ) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet (or any extension of the Latin alphabet). A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in Old Norse for the sounds /u/, /v/, and /w/.

As with þ, the letter wynn was revived in modern times for the printing of Old English texts, but since the early 20th century the usual practice has been to substitute the modern w.

Wynn in Unicode

Capital wynn (left), lowercase wynn (right)

The following wynn and wynn-related characters are in Unicode:[4]

  • U+01F7 Ƿ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER WYNN
  • U+01BF ƿ LATIN LETTER WYNN
  • U+16B9 RUNIC LETTER WUNJO WYNN W
  • U+A768 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER VEND
  • U+A769 LATIN SMALL LETTER VEND
  • U+A7D5 LATIN SMALL LETTER DOUBLE WYNN[5]

Computing codes

Character information
PreviewǷƿ
Unicode name LATIN CAPITAL LETTER WYNN LATIN SMALL LETTER WYNN
Encodingsdecimalhexdechex
Unicode503U+01F7447U+01BF
UTF-8199 183C7 B7198 191C6 BF
Numeric character referenceǷǷƿƿ

References

  1. "wyn". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  2. Freeborn, Dennis (1992). From Old English to Standard English. London: MacMillan. p. 25. ISBN 9780776604695.
  3. Dickins, Bruce (1915). Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 14-15.
  4. "UCD: UnicodeData.txt". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2022-11-22.
  5. Everson, Michael; West, Andrew (2020-10-05). "L2/20-268: Revised proposal to add ten characters for Middle English to the UCS" (PDF).

See also

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