Rhotacism in Norse

[Steve Gustafson]

David L. White wrote:

<< I cannot find among my home sources here when it was that rhotacism of
final /z/ occurred in Norse, leading to the characteristically Norse profusion
of /-r/.  More precisely, when is it that the original two runes begin to be
confused?  Does anyone out there know? >>

I was out of town when it happened.

But it was after 800 C.E. that the elder futhark, which contained the symbol
for z/R, yielded to the reduced younger futhark.  This alphabet appeared
first in Denmark, and spread throughout the rest of Scandinavia by the year
900.

We know that Gothic, written by Ulfilas in around 375, was wholly innocent
of the s > r change.  The change seems to have taken hold in two steps; the
intermediate one, preseved in the runes, is a sound written by the 'yr'
rune, and usually transliterated as 'R.'  The earlier runic inscriptions
always carefully distinguished between 'r' and 'R;' inscriptions after 800
are less careful, and occasionally use 'r' in word-final positions where 'R'
would be expected.  The Ro"k stone from around 900 sometimes uses 'R' in
mid-word, which suggests that its carver heard it as a phoneme.  R remained
part of the alphabet at least until after 1000, when the semi-Christianised
Rune Song was written.    Generally 'r' is used much more often than 'R' by
around 1150, at least in Denmark and Sweden.

It may be that too much can be read in the runic evidence, if only because
the switch to the shortened alphabet was probably not motivated by purely
phonetic considerations.  The shorter alphabet is in fact noticeably
inferior to the one it replaced.  It flattened out distinctions between
voiced and unvoiced consonants, that were surely still meaningful in the
spoken language, and consistently observed when the Latin script was used to
write the language.  Later rune writers found it helpful to add dots to
distinguish voiced characters from the unvoiced ones.  If they made so
unhelpful a change to their alphabet, though, their writing may be
conventional rather than phonemic.

For more info, look at E.V. Gordon's -Introduction to Old Norse-, (2nd
edition, revised by A. R. Taylor, 1954); and E. Haugen's -The Scandinavian
Languages- (don't have it handy, sorry)

--
  Quae vestimenta
       induet misella
            in conviviis crastinis?