Runic Feature Request: More Alternate Rune Shapes

[eirikvw]

I’d like to request some alternate runic shapes for a future build.

I use Junicode mainly for the runes, as it’s wonderful to have a font that can do Latin letters and clean & elegant runes inline with each other relatively seamlessly. (And runes with bold and italic options on top of that.) I know that mirrored runes are already in version 1, but I’d like to request some true alternate shapes (kind of like how you have different Old English and Icelandic versions of the Thorn letter, Þ).

My particular interest now is in alternates for the following:

• U+16A2 Runic Letter Uruz Ur U
• U+16A3 Runic Letter Yr
• U+16E5 Runic Letter Stan
• U+16EF Runic Tvimadur Symbol

For reference here’s a picture of how they are in Junicode 1.0, along with my desired variant shapes:

That is, Uruz and Yr with a three-stroke “bowl” instead of a two-stroke bowl, Stan without those interior twigs/crosshatches, and Tvimadur with entirely straight lines instead of curves (this last one should essentially be a doubled/mirrored version of the current junicode 1.0 form of U+16C9 Runic Letter Algiz Eolhx).

Alternate stave forms elsewhere in the runic range might well be of interest to others (such as straight-line-only variants of staves with curved lines, or other historical variants). You may be aware of Babelstone Runic, which has multiple fonts to cover variant shapes, but they don’t exactly play well together to mix and match them if you want particular shapes (differing stroke thickness, differing height at same point size, no bold or italic, etc.). There may be an opportunity here for Junicode to further outshine other fonts on the runic range.

But it is these four alternate shapes that would be most useful to me at this time.

[psb1558]

I'd like to do this after the current cleanup operation and the release of version 2.0. But it would be good to have as comprehensive a set of variants as possible, and more info, like whether these (or some of these) are language-specific variants. I believe that MUFI is also getting interested in runic variants, so I'd like to coordinate with them.

[eirikvw]

Thanks!

I think overall, most rune variants will be stylistic variants, not necessarily language-specific. That mostly includes these four, for which Yr and Stan were specifically Old Frisian / Old English developments, and I don’t know if drilling down to dialect/region level where variants were used is worthwhile or even possible in this.

Also, the Tvimadur variant that I’m interested in occurs in an Elder Futhark inscription (the Charny fibula)—as a variant of the Algiz rune. But the Unicode designation of Tvimadur comes from the late medieval “runic calendars” among the Norse. So though the two shapes look related, they aren’t, at least not in a “direct descent” fashion. Possibly one could make an argument to have the no-curves Tvimadur as a variant of both Algiz (historical use) and Tvimadur (probably historical use somewhere, but also aesthetic—if one is typing with all no-curve runes, putting in a curved rune looks a bit hideous, like dropping a sans-serif letter in the middle of serif text).

All this is to say, that, while I don’t quite have enough knowledge of variants across time and space to answer the language-specific question generally, I suspect that few variants, if any, could be put into a neat language-specific classification.

And thanks for mentioning MUFI. I see they’ve done quite a bit of thinking on variants.

[psb1558]

Okay. We'll wait till the current project is done, then consult with MUFI. I'd much rather have a comprehensive solution than a series of small fixes.