That there are exactly 33 runes in the American Futharch is not an arbitrary designation. Here’s a short discussion of how one gets there, linguistically.
- The starting point is the phonology in the New Oxford American Dictionary (NOAD). The edition I use is built into the Dictionary app on my Mac computer, so if you have a Mac, you can dig it up as well. The main takeaway here is that this is a mainstream and generally accepted source on the pronunciation, and nothing in it is controversial as phonology goes.
- For English words according to General American pronunciation, the NOAD uses exactly 36 different phonetic symbols. (Some foreign words use a few other symbols.) These are the IPA symbols of the 33 American Futharch runes, plus three more, [a], [e], and [o], which only occur in the diphthongs Ale /eɪ/, Oak /oʊ/, Ice /aɪ/, and Ounce /aʊ/.
- It turns out that those three, [a], [e], and [o] aren’t truly independent sounds (phonemes), but are rather allophones of three of the 33 runes/phonemes, so it makes better sense to write them using those three runes (Elk, Ore, Ash) rather than give them separate runes.
- In doing so, I am following an argument of Aldo Luiz Bizzocchi in his article, “How Many Phonemes Does the English Language Have?” Here’s a short summary of how I’m using it:
- I treat [a] as an allophone of Ash /æ/, [o] as an allophone of Ore /ɔ/, and [e] as an allophone of Elk /ɛ/. This works because [a], [e], and [o] do not occur outside those above-mentioned diphthongs, and furthermore, because conflicting diphthongs to be distinguished don’t exist.
- Put another way, we can use Ash /æ/ to represent the first sound of /aɪ/, because there is no /æɪ/ diphthong in the language that needs to be distinguished from /aɪ/. If there were an /æɪ/ diphthong, then this absolutely wouldn’t work. But there isn’t. The same holds for the other three diphthongs above, in that /æʊ/, /ɔʊ/, /ɛɪ/ don’t exist in the language. (Note that the fifth diphthong in American English, Oyster /ɔɪ/, does not require posting any allophones to write it under this system.)
- The allophone concept may strike some people as strange, but other allophone groupings are indeed quite standard in linguistic descriptions of English. For instance, it is universal to group as /t/ both the aspirated and non-aspirated forms of that sound (in words such as top vs. stop). Similarly, /l/ consists of both the so-called “Light L” and “Dark L.” And NOAD already groups [ə], [ʌ], [ɜ] together as /ə/.
- Bizzocchi also talks about British English, but I am focusing here exclusively on American English, and I have not made use of everything from his article, just mainly this critical allophony. And so, I refer to the set of equivalences of a=æ, e=ɛ and o=ɔ as the “Bizzocchi allophony.”
- That brings us down to exactly 33 runes and the 5 diphthongs as depicted in the cover sheet on the home page. And that’s the linguistics behind the 33 runes.
- There are, of course, non–linguistic reasons to embrace and celebrate that the total should be precisely 33. One of the significant ones is mentioned on the home page, namely that there are 9 vowels to correspond to the 9 worlds, and 24 consonants to correspond to the 24 roadways of Yggdrasil.
I’ve endeavored to keep this discussion relatively simple. More details could be added if that proves necessary.