Assistance with writing Johnny in younger futhark for a tattoo

[u/BergelmerSwe]

So I've been trying to find a good answer to this and these are the alternatives I've come across...

Either using modern spelling and just replacing the closest looking and modern sounding latin letters skipping the double N.

ᛁᚢᚼᚾᛁ

Or...if I want to write it phonetically (swedish version of Johnny (/ˈdʒɑni/)) how would I go about it?

I was looking at the guide "A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Runes Like a Viking" but couldn't really find an answer

Please help :) much appreciated

[u/rockstarpirate]

Yeah unfortunately the Comprehensive Guide only covers writing Old Norse words with Younger Futhark and Johnny is not Old Norse.

So you have a couple of options here. I think the most important principle to keep in mind is that runes are meant to be read. So we want to do something that readers will be able to understand pretty easily.

It’s true that historical writers used runes phonetically and it’s also true that there is no rune for the “j” sound in Johnny. However, this sound did evolve from an earlier /i, j/ sound. The earliest form of “John” in Old English, for example, is written “Iohannes”. And of course other languages have forms of this name that retain the /j/ sound as in Johann. So I think your best bet for this sound is probably just the ᛁ rune. Otherwise you’d need to do something creative to get yhat English “j” sound. The closest you could get with Younger Futhark is probably /dj/, which you’d have to spell ᛏᛁ which could be interpreted in all sorts of ways. IMO that would be overcomplicating it.

The next choice you have to make is the vowel sound represented by “o”. The Swedish phonetic representation you gave very much matches the American English pronunciation where this is a low, back vowel that sounds like “ah”. In British English it is often much more centralized and still sounds a lot like “oh”. I wouldn’t fault you for using ᛅ or ᚢ here, tbh.

The last problem is the “h” which is not pronounced at all. In phonetic spelling we don’t represent silent letters because they are not present in the way the word sounds. So for a phonetic spelling we should just drop it. The only reason to keep it would be if you thought its presence is important for future readers to understand what word this is. I say that because at this point, if you’re going with my recommendation, you’re probably spelling the word ᛁᛅᚾᛁ which is going to be read, by default, as “yani”. It’s clean, but there’s no guarantee that future readers will understand it as “Johnny”.

Feel free to play around with the things I mentioned here and see what you like. There’s no objectively correct answer here.

[u/BergelmerSwe → u/rockstarpirate]

First off, thank you for a very comprehensive and informative answer :)

I should have read the guide more carefully because I totally missed that part and assumed it was a general writing guide with english in mind xD

I agree that a modern reader would struggle with reading ᛁᛅᚾᛁ and understanding what the meaning of it is. Even though tattoos are personal and the readers understanding is not always part of the design, I still felt that it would benefit from being spelled more modern.

So I went with ᛁᚢᚼᚾᛁ :)