Editing Old Norse (section)

== Orthography ==
{{Main|Old Norse orthography}}
Unlike Proto-Norse, which was written with the [[Elder Futhark]], [[runic]] Old Norse was originally written with the [[Younger Futhark]], which had only 16 letters. Because of the limited number of runes, several runes were used for different sounds, and long and short vowels were not distinguished in writing. [[Medieval runes]] came into use some time later.

As for the [[Latin alphabet]], there was no standardized orthography in use in the Middle Ages. A modified version of the letter [[wynn]] called [[vend (letter)|vend]] was used briefly for the sounds {{IPA|/u/}}, {{IPA|/v/}}, and {{IPA|/w/}}. Long vowels were sometimes marked with acutes but also sometimes left unmarked or geminated. The [[Old Norse orthography#Normalized spelling|standardized Old Norse spelling]] was created in the 19th century and is, for the most part, phonemic. The most notable deviation is that the nonphonemic difference between the [[voiced dental fricative|voiced]] and the [[voiceless dental fricative]] is marked. The oldest texts and [[runic inscriptions]] use [[thorn (letter)|''þ'']] exclusively. Long vowels are denoted with [[acute accent|acutes]]. Most other letters are written with the same glyph as the [[International Phonetic Alphabet|IPA]] phoneme, except as shown in the table below.