R/ denotes the reflex of Germanic /z/, a voiced palatal fricative with sibilant quality. In
Norway it seems to have coalesced with /r/ by the ninth century, but in Danish and
Swedish runic tradition r and R were distinguished in some phonological environments
until well into the twelfth century; in Gotland even longer. In the earliest Viking Age
inscriptions, as in those from before the Viking Age, there seems to be no way of
distinguishing between ‘that’ and ‘this’: þau defines kumbl, but not obviously as some-
thing close at hand or more distant. Aft is a short form of the preposition eptir, parallel to
fyr for fyrir and und for undir. The short forms are on the whole earlier than their longer
counterparts. Sunu is an old acc. sg. form with the original (pre-syncope) -u preserved
(thus possibly also the u in Styggu, but the etymology of this name is uncertain).
The demonstratives sá, sú are regularly used in Viking Age runic inscriptions to denote
‘he’, ‘she’. Fial is an East Scandinavian variant of West Scandinavian fell. Auk is an older
form of ok with the diphthong preserved (the conjunction is related to the verb auka
‘increase’).
Jelling II
haraltr:kunukR:baþ:kaurua
kubl:þausi:aft:kurmfaþursin
aukaft:þa ̨urui:muþur:sina:sa
haraltr[:]ias:sa ̨R:uan:tanmaurk
ala:auk:nuruiak
:auk:t(a ̨)ni[:](karþi)[:]kristna ̨Haraldr konung bað go ̨rva kumbl þausi aft Gorm faður sinn auk aft Þórví móður sína. Sá
Haraldr es sé vann Danmo ̨rk alla auk Norveg auk dani gærði kristna.King Haraldr ordered these memorials to be made after Gormr, his father, and after
Þórví, his mother. That Haraldr who won for himself all Denmark and Norway and
made the Danes Christian.There is disagreement about what the sequences au and ia denote in Danish inscriptions
of the mid- and late Viking Age. Some argue that after the East Scandinavian
monophthongisation /ei/ > /e:/, /au, øy/ > /ø:/, digraphic spellings were used to denote
vowel sounds for which the runic alphabet of the time had no specific symbols, au
denoting /ø/ or // and ia /æ/. Others believe that in the case of ia, at least, some kind of
diphthongisation is reflected (cf. Swedish dialectal jär as a reflex of hér ‘here’, sometimes
seen as a relic of the Viking Age ‘trading-centre norm’). We may note that au became a
common way of indicating // throughout the Scandinavian runic world – including the
West where there was no monophthongisation. While acc. faður lacks labial mutation,
as commonly in East Scandinavian, the second element of Danmo ̨rk would seem to have a
mutated vowel. In the East Scandinavian of the Viking Age the demonstrative pronoun
meaning ‘this/these’ usually consisted of the basic pronoun sá, sú, þat plus the deictic
(pointing) particle -sa or -si. Hence þennsi (acc. m. sg.), þassi (< þar + si, acc. f. pl.), þausi
(acc. n. pl.).
–– chapter 20: The Scandinavian languages in the Viking Age––