Choosing a name that terminates in -z would have been more or less arbitrary, as this was the nominative singular suffix of almost every masculine noun of the language. Like the ng-rune, the z-rune is a special case inasmuch as it could not have been named acrophonically, since the sound it represents did not occur in word-initial position. There is wide agreement that this is most likely not the historical name of the rune, but in the absence of any positive evidence of what the historical name may have been, the conventional name is simply based on a reading of the rune name in the Anglo-Saxon rune poem, first suggested by Wilhelm Grimm ( Über deutsche Runen, 1821), as eolh or eolug 'elk'. The Elder Futhark rune ᛉ is conventionally called Algiz or Elhaz, from the Common Germanic word for ' elk'. The shape of the rune may be derived from that a letter expressing /x/ in certain Old Italic alphabets ( 𐌙), which was in turn derived from the Greek letter Ψ which had the value of /kʰ/ (rather than /ps/) in the Western Greek alphabet. This phoneme eventually became indistinguishable from the regular r sound in the later stages of Old Norse, at about the 11th or 12th century. This sound was written in the Younger Futhark using the Yr rune ᛦ, the Algiz rune turned upside down, from about the 7th century. In Proto-Norse and Old Norse, the Germanic *z phoneme developed into an R sound, perhaps realized as a retroflex approximant, which is usually transcribed as ʀ.

This is a secondary development, possibly due to runic manuscript tradition, and there is no known instance of the rune being used in an Old English inscription. In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc it retained its shape, but it was given the sound value of Latin x. As the terminal *-z phoneme marks the nominative singular suffix of masculine nouns, the rune occurs comparatively frequently in early epigraphy.īecause this specific phoneme was lost at an early time, the Elder Futhark rune underwent changes in the medieval runic alphabets. It is one of two runes which express a phoneme that does not occur word-initially, and thus could not be named acrophonically, the other being the ŋ-rune Ingwaz ᛜ. Its transliteration is z, understood as a phoneme of the Proto-Germanic language, the terminal *z continuing Proto-Indo-European terminal *s. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of runes.Īlgiz (also Elhaz) is the name conventionally given to the ' z-rune' ᛉ of the Elder Futhark runic alphabet.

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