Ehwaz
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Name | Proto-Germanic | Old English |
---|---|---|
*Ehwaz | E(o)h | |
"horse" | ||
Shape | Elder Futhark | Futhorc |
Unicode | ᛖ U+16D6 | |
Transliteration | e | |
Transcription | e | |
IPA | [e(ː)] | |
Position in rune-row | 19 |
*Ehwaz is the reconstructed Proto-Germanic name of the Elder Futhark e rune ᛖ, meaning "horse" (cognate to Latin equus, Gaulish epos, Tocharian B yakwe, Sanskrit aśva, Avestan aspa and Old Irish ech). In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc, it is continued as ᛖ eh (properly eoh, but spelled without the diphthong to avoid confusion with ᛇ ēoh "yew").
The Proto-Germanic vowel system was asymmetric and unstable. The difference between the long vowels expressed by ᛖ e and ᛇ ï (sometimes transcribed as *ē1 and *ē2) was lost. The Younger Futhark continues neither, lacking a letter expressing e altogether. The Anglo-Saxon futhorc faithfully preserved all Elder futhorc staves, but assigned new sound values to the redundant ones, futhorc ēoh expressing a diphthong.
In the case of the Gothic alphabet, where the names of the runes were re-applied to letters derived from the Greek alphabet, the letter