ƿynn
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Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, win, ƿynn, ƿyn, ƿen, and ƿin) is a letter of the Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound .


History


The letter "W"

While the earliest
Old English Old English ( or , or ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...
texts represent this
phoneme A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
with the
digraph Digraph, often misspelled as diagraph, may refer to: * Digraph (orthography), a pair of characters used together to represent a single sound, such as "nq" in Hmong RPA * Ligature (writing), the joining of two letters as a single glyph, such as " ...
, scribes soon borrowed the
rune Runes are the letters in a set of related alphabets, known as runic rows, runic alphabets or futharks (also, see '' futhark'' vs ''runic alphabet''), native to the Germanic peoples. Runes were primarily used to represent a sound value (a ...
''wynn'' for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use during the
Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman Conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English pe ...
period, circa 1300. In post-wynn texts, it was sometimes replaced with but often replaced with a ligature form of , which the modern letter developed from.


Meaning

The denotation of the rune is "
joy Joy is the state of being that allows one to experience feelings of intense, long-lasting happiness and contentment of life. It is closely related to, and often evoked by, well-being, success, or good fortune. Happiness, pleasure, and gratitu ...
,
bliss BLISS is a system programming language developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) by W. A. Wulf, D. B. Russell, and A. N. Habermann around 1970. It was perhaps the best known system language until C debuted a few years later. Since then, C ...
", known from the Anglo-Saxon
rune poem Rune poems are poems that list the letters of runic alphabets while providing an explanatory poetic stanza for each letter. Four different poems from before the mid-20th century have been preserved: the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, the Norwegian Rune ...
s:


Miscellaneous

It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, but in the
Gothic alphabet The Gothic alphabet is an alphabet for writing the Gothic language. It was developed in the 4th century AD by Ulfilas (or Wulfila), a Gothic preacher of Cappadocian Greek descent, for the purpose of translating the Bible. The alphabet e ...
, the letter ''w'' is called , allowing a
Proto-Germanic Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the linguistic reconstruction, reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic languages, Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Proto-Germanic eventually developed from ...
reconstruction of the rune's name as ''*wunjô'' "joy". It is one of the two runes (along with thorn, þ) to have been borrowed into the
English alphabet Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 Letter (alphabet), letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word ''alphabet'' is a Compound (linguistics), compound of ''alpha'' and ''beta'', t ...
(or any extension of the
Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the Ancient Rome, ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from ...
). A modified version of the letter wynn called vend was used briefly in
Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...
for the sounds , , and . The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the
classical Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also known as the Roman alphabet, is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered except several letters splitting—i.e. from , and from —additions su ...
's ''P'', or ''Q'', or from the Rhaetic's alphabet's ''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 .


Unicode

The following wynn and wynn-related characters are in
Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
: * * * * * *This character has been approved to be encoded as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DOUBLE WYNN in Unicode 17.0
See here.
/ref> *


Computing codes


References


See also

*
Digamma Digamma or wau (uppercase: Ϝ, lowercase: ϝ, numeral: ϛ) is an Archaic Greek alphabets, archaic letter of the Greek alphabet. It originally stood for the sound but it has remained in use principally as a Greek numeral for 6 (number), 6. Whe ...
*
Eth Eth ( , uppercase: ⟨Ð⟩, lowercase: ⟨ð⟩; also spelled edh or eð), known as in Old English, is a letter used in Old English, Middle English, Icelandic, Faroese (in which it is called ), and Elfdalian. It was also used in Sca ...
*
Meldorf fibula The Meldorf fibula is a Germanic spring-case-type fibula found in Meldorf, Schleswig-Holstein in 1979. Though the exact circumstances of the recovery of the fibula are unknown, it is thought to have come from a cremation grave, probably that of ...
*
Thorn (letter) Thorn or þorn (Þ, þ) is a letter in the Old English Latin alphabet, Old English, Old Norse alphabet, Old Norse, Old Swedish and modern Icelandic orthography, Icelandic alphabets, as well as modern transliterations of the Gothic language, Goth ...
*
Vend (letter) Vend (Ꝩ, ꝩ) is a letter of Old Norse. It was used to represent the sounds , , and . It was related to and probably derived from the Old English letter Wynn of the Runic alphabet (ᚹ) and later the Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, ...
*
Yogh The letter yogh (ȝogh) ( ; Scots: ; Middle English: ) is a Latin script letter that was used in Middle English and Older Scots, representing ''y'' () and various velar phonemes. It was derived from the Insular form of the letter ''g'', Ᵹ ...
*
The Middle Welsh V, depicted as Ỽ or ỽ, is a letter employed in Middle Welsh texts between the 13th and 14th centuries. It represented the sounds of v, u, and w and prior to inclusion in the Latin Extended Additional block of Unicode charac ...
{{Latin script, W , show pairs = no
Wynn Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, win, ƿynn, ƿyn, ƿen, and ƿin) is a letter of the Old English Latin alphabet, Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound . History The letter "W" While the earliest Old English texts ...
Runes Latin-script letters
Wynn Wynn or wyn (; also spelled wen, win, ƿynn, ƿyn, ƿen, and ƿin) is a letter of the Old English Latin alphabet, Old English alphabet, where it is used to represent the sound . History The letter "W" While the earliest Old English texts ...
Runology