Wynn

While the earliest Old English texts represent this phoneme with the digraph {{angle bracket|uu}}, scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn {{runic|ᚹ}} 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.

{{cite book |last=Freeborn |first=Dennis |year=1992 |title=From Old English to Standard English |location=London |publisher=MacMillan |page=25 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=CP16STG5NRUC|isbn=9780776604695}} In post-wynn texts, it was sometimes replaced with {{angle bracket|u}} but often replaced with a ligature form of {{angle bracket|uu}}, which the modern letter {{angle bracket|w}} developed from.

The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss", known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poems:

{{cite book |last=Dickins |first=Bruce |url=https://archive.org/details/runicheroicpoems00dick |title=Runic and Heroic Poems of the Old Teutonic Peoples |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1915 |location=Cambridge |page=[https://archive.org/details/runicheroicpoems00dick/page/14 14]–15}}

{{blockquote|text={{runic|ᚹ}} {{lang|ang|Ƿenne brūceþ, þe can ƿēana lẏt
sāres and sorge and him sẏlfa hæf
blǣd and blẏsse and eac bẏrga geniht.}}|source=Lines 22–24 in the Anglo-Saxon runic poem}}

{{blockquote|Who uses it knows no pain,
sorrow nor anxiety, and he himself has
prosperity and bliss, and also enough shelter.|source=Translation slightly modified from Dickins (1915)}}

It is not continued in the Younger Futhark, but in the Gothic alphabet, the letter {{script|Goth|𐍅}} w is called {{Transliteration|got|winja}}, allowing a Proto-Germanic 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 (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 {{IPA|/u/}}, {{IPA|/v/}}, and {{IPA|/w/}}.

The rune may have been an original innovation, or it may have been adapted from the classical Latin alphabet's P,{{Citation | last = Odenstedt | first = Bengt | year = 1990 | title = On the Origin and Early History of the Runic Script, Typology and Graphic Variation in the Older Futhark | place = Uppsala | isbn = 91-85352-20-9}}. or Q,{{citation needed|date=May 2024}} or from the Rhaetic's alphabet's W.{{Citation | publisher = Uni Frankfurt | last = Gippert | first = Jost | url = http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/idg/germ/runealph.htm | title = The Development of Old Germanic Alphabets | access-date = 2007-03-21 | archive-date = 2021-02-25 | archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20210225051327/http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/idg/germ/runealph.htm | url-status = live }}. 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 {{angle bracket|w}}.

Image:Wynn.svg

The following wynn and wynn-related characters are in Unicode:{{cite web|url=http://www.unicode.org/Public/UCD/latest/ucd/UnicodeData.txt|title=UCD: UnicodeData.txt|work=The Unicode Standard|accessdate=2022-11-22}}

• {{unichar|01f7|LATIN CAPITAL LETTER WYNN|html=}}
• {{unichar|01bf|LATIN LETTER WYNN|html=}}
• {{unichar|16b9|RUNIC LETTER WUNJO WYNN W|html=}}
• {{unichar|A768|LATIN CAPITAL LETTER VEND|html=}}
• {{unichar|A769|LATIN SMALL LETTER VEND|html=}}
• {{unichar|A7D4|LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DOUBLE WYNN|html=꟔}}This character has been approved to be encoded as LATIN CAPITAL LETTER DOUBLE WYNN in Unicode 17.0. [https://unicode.org/alloc/Pipeline.html See here.]
• {{unichar|A7D5|LATIN SMALL LETTER DOUBLE WYNN|html=}}{{Cite web|title=L2/20-268: Revised proposal to add ten characters for Middle English to the UCS|url=https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20268-n5145-ormulum.pdf|date=2020-10-05|first1=Michael|last1=Everson|first2=Andrew|last2=West}}

{{Charmap|01F7|01BF|name1=Latin Capital Letter Wynn|name2=Latin Small Letter Wynn}}

{{reflist}}

• Digamma
• Eth
• Meldorf fibula
• Thorn (letter)
• Vend (letter)
• Yogh
• Ỽ

{{Runes}}{{Latin script|W

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Wynn

Category:Runes

Category:Latin-script letters

Wynn

Category:Runology