Why do Norse words end in R?

kmyong00 said: From what I’ve learnt the -r suffix is a marker for most masculine nouns in Old Norse. It’s kept in when the noun is nominative and removed when the noun is accusative.

How do you say family in Old Norse?

Hirdman (plural Hirdmen) is a word in Scandinavian languages (notably Norwegian and Swedish), literally for a member of a Hird ‘household, family’.

What words come from Old Norse?

In fact, English received many really, really common words from Old Norse, such as give, take, get, and both. And sale, cake, egg, husband, fellow, sister, root, rag, loose, raise, rugged, odd, plough, freckle, call, flat, hale, ugly, and lake.

What does Thor mean in Norwegian?

Meaning & History From the Old Norse Þórr meaning “thunder”, ultimately from the early Germanic *Þunraz. In Norse mythology Thor is a god of storms, thunder, war and strength, a son of Odin.

What were the fiercest Viking warriors known as?

Berserkers
Berserkers. ‘Berserkr’ is an Old Norse word meaning ‘bear skin’ and berserkers were Viking warriors who went into battle wearing wolf or bear skins. Berserkers believed that Odin, the god of war, gave them superhuman powers and that they didn’t need to wear battle armour for protection.

Why did we stop using thorn?

Originally, it was an entirely different letter called thorn, which derived from the Old English runic alphabet, Futhark. We replaced it with ‘th’ over time—thorn fell out of use because Gothic-style scripting made the letters Y and thorn look practically identical.

Why did English lose the thorn?

In some languages they were distinct, but in English, either letter could be used for voiced or voiceless. Intuitively, one might think that one of these letters would ‘win’, and replace the other. Indeed: thorn (þ) won, and eth (ð) died out. Instead, we lost both of these letters and use the digraph th instead.

Why do some words sound different in later Proto-Norse?

In later Proto-Norse, they may not have always sounded exactly like that. The language experienced something called umlaut, where a sound in one part of the word effected a sound in another. The language had already gone through one of them. A-umlaut has a “lowering” effect.

Why not write in Old Norse with the Elder Futhark runes?

People sometimes want to write in Old Norse with the Elder Futhark runes, simply because they are visually more appealing. Why not. However, the standard runic alphabet for the Viking Age runic inscriptions was the Younger Futhark. It had three variants: Long Branch: Danish runes (also often considered as the standard Younger Futhark set).

What is the root word for child in Norse?

In Proto-Norse, the word for ‘child’ was * barna and the plural, ‘children,’ was * barnu. Because of u-umlaut, the latter was actually pronounced more like bǫrnu [ˈbɔrnu] in West Norse.

What words have the rune reið at the end?

Note, however, that r at the end of the words faðir ‘father’, bróðir ‘brother’, móðir ‘mother’, dóttir ‘daughter’ and systir ‘sister’ belongs to the stem and not the ending, so all these words have reið rune at the end. The word Thor also has reið, since r + R gave r: Þórr ( þur) < Þonar < ÞunraR < Þunraz