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Wynn (also spelled wen, ?ynn, or ?en) was a letter of the Old English alphabet
English alphabet

The modern English alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 26 letters, like in the Basic modern Latin alphabet:The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface....
. It was used to represent the sound .

While the earliest Old English
Old English language

Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century....
 texts represent this phoneme with the digraph
Digraph (orthography)

A digraph, bigraph , or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined....
 , scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn for this purpose.






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Wynn
Wynn (also spelled wen, ?ynn, or ?en) was a letter of the Old English alphabet
English alphabet

The modern English alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 26 letters, like in the Basic modern Latin alphabet:The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface....
. It was used to represent the sound .

While the earliest Old English
Old English language

Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken and written in parts of what are now England and south-eastern Scotland between the mid-5th century and the mid-12th century....
 texts represent this phoneme with the digraph
Digraph (orthography)

A digraph, bigraph , or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined....
 , scribes soon borrowed the rune wynn
Runic Letter Wunjo
for this purpose. It remained a standard letter throughout the Anglo-Saxon era, eventually falling out of use (perhaps under the influence of French orthography) during the Middle English
Middle English

Middle English is the name given by historical linguistics to the diverse forms of the English language spoken between the Norman conquest of England of 1066 and about 1470, when the #Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, began to become widespread, a process aided by the introduction of the printing press into England by William...
 period, circa 1300 (Freeborn 1992:25). It was replaced with once again, from which the modern <w
W

W is the 23 letter in the Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is spelled double-u ....
> developed.

The denotation of the rune is "joy, bliss" known from the Anglo-Saxon rune poem
Rune poem

The Rune Poems are three poems that list the letters of runic alphabets while providing an explanatory poetic stanza for each letter. Three different poems have been preserved: the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem, the Norwegian Rune Poem, and the Icelandic Rune Poem....
:



Bliss he enjoys who knows not pain,
sorrow nor anxiety, and himself has
prosperity and bliss and a good enough house.


It is not continued in the Younger Futhark
Younger Futhark

The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a runic alphabet, a reduced form of the Elder Futhark, consisting of only 16 characters, in use from ca....
, but in the Gothic alphabet
Gothic alphabet

The Gothic alphabet is an alphabetic writing system attributed by Philostorgius to Ulfilas , used exclusively for writing the ancient Gothic language....
, the letter w is called winja, allowing a Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic language

Proto-Germanic, or Common Germanic, as it is sometimes known, is the hypothetical common ancestor of all the Germanic languages such as modern English language, Dutch language, German language, Danish language, Norwegian language, Icelandic language, Faroese language, and Swedish language....
 reconstruction of the rune's name as *wunjô "joy".

It is one of the two runes
Runic alphabet

The runic alphabets are a set of related alphabets using Letter known as runes to write various Germanic languages prior to the adoption of the Latin alphabet and for specialized purposes thereafter....
 (along with þ
Thorn (letter)

Thorn, or ?orn , is a letter in the Old English language and Icelandic alphabet alphabets. It was also used in medieval Scandinavia, but was later replaced with the digraph th. The letter originated from the runic alphabet in the Elder Fu?ark, called thorn in the Anglo-Saxon and thorn or thurs in the Scandinavian rune...
) to have been borrowed into the English alphabet
English alphabet

The modern English alphabet is a Latin-based alphabet consisting of 26 letters, like in the Basic modern Latin alphabet:The exact shape of printed letters varies depending on the typeface....
 (or any extension of the Latin alphabet
Latin alphabet

The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumae alphabet, and was initially developed by the Ancient Romes to write the Latin....
). A modified version of the letter ynn called Vend
Vend (letter)

Vend is a letter of Old Norse. It was used to represent the sound , , and .It was related to and probably derived from the Old English language letter Wynn , except that the bowl was open on the top, not being connected to the stem, which made it somewhat resemble a letter Y....
 was used briefly in Old Norse
Old Norse

Old Norse is a North Germanic languages that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....
 for the sounds , , and .

As with þ, ?ynn 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 instead due to ?ynn's visual resemblance to P
P

P is the sixteenth letter of the modern Latin alphabet. Its name in English language is pronounced pee ....
.

ynn in Unicode and HTML Entities

Latin Capital Letter Wynn ? and &#503; 
Latin Small Letter Wynn ? and &#447;
Runic Letter Wynn and &#5817;


See also

  • Meldorf fibula
    Meldorf fibula

    The Meldorf fibula is a Germanic peoples Fibulae_and_ancient_brooches#Fibulae_Components Fibulae and ancient brooches found in Meldorf, Schleswig-Holstein in 1979....