Beneath the Surface

Projects for today:
Continue taking notes on runecasting methods.
Work on the heathen altar.
(Later on.) Piece Seven Sisters blocks while watching Criminal Intent.

I am making chicken soup with wild rice today; I'm not sure what I'm going to do to make it--right now I've just got the chicken cooking--but I'm sure I'll come up with something. Probably including brown rice as well. I looked at a few recipes for inspiration, from one of those sites where folks just submit recipes, and I'm wondering whether these people actually make the recipe in question before they send it in there, because I'm pretty sure that if you make a soup base, add two cups of wild rice, and cook for ten minutes you are not going to end up with something delicious, you're going to end up with quills in your tongue. (My guess, they meant instant wild rice. People who use non-standard variants of ingredients in their recipe need to specify.)

Oh, and I did take that "How Difficult Was Your Childhood?" meme that's been going around. Then the browser crashed (often does at that site) so I don't have the code. But it came up with either "Extremely Easy" or "Very Easy." Which is cool. Hey, as a mom that's one of my goals, that my own kids have an "Extremely Easy" childhood. :)

Probably you're already on this if you want to be, but here I've had a paid account all this time and I've never used the poll function :). (Also, if anyone knows how to put a poll on your userinfo page, please let me know--I know it can be done because I've seen it, but I can't seem to work it out from the FAQ.)

[Poll #487697]

Edit: You might also want to add a comment; I don't get emailed notices when someone does the poll (is there a way to do it?) so I won't be able to tell otherwise.

I wonder where the mitre box went. If I can find it, I've got my project for the evening.

So when you (speaking to you who do this, obviously :)) are writing in runes (in English, but in runes), do you do it phonetically or do you go letter by letter (apart from thurisaz for "th" and inguz for "ng", of course)?

If I'm doing it for myself, I'd totally go the phonetic way--but if it's something I need other people to be able to read?

Would you do it differently depending on situation? If so, which situations call for which usage?

I asked Dan, because he's been doing it for years (albeit in a SCA setting rather than a heathen one) and he says he's done it both ways. When he does it phonetically, he tries to consider the etymology of the word. For example, if he's transcribing the "wh" sound in "which", he uses hagalaz-wunjo rather than wunjo-hagalaz. Because that's what it was originally. (And it's what it sounds like.) Presumably if he's writing the "wh" sound in "who" he uses hagalaz alone.

But that can be confusing to a modern reader, even one with a little linguistic background. I asked him how he'd go about trancribing "weave," because regardless of whether you do it phonetically or letter-by letter, you've got wunjo in there twice, for two letter sounds ("w" and "v"). He said he'd (phonetically) spell it wunjo-isa-fehu. Because that's the etymology of the word. The problem there is that a modern person looking at that would read it as "wife" rather than "weave". Perhaps it would be clear from context, but you can't count on that. And yeah, it does reflect the original context of the root, which isn't a bad thing, but I'm thinking of clarity. Maybe that's my tech-writing background coming in, maybe it's not clarity that's the important thing?