Pan-Germanic Logograms

[Lambuzhao]

Poignant point, Davush.

Just from a syntactic standpoint, there's the German and Dutch essentially SOV structure that does not obtain for, say, English or the Northern Germanic gang.

Also, there are the North Germanic postclitic Definite Articles -v- pre-positional Definite Articles in , .

[clawgrip]

Indeed, there's no question that things will be weird even with a logography. An English speaker reading other languages would regularly have to deal with sentences like, "Stakeholm are Swederike's headstead and land-the cultural, political, medial, economish centre. It are Swederike's so-well some Norden's folkrichest tightort."

(Forgive me, I couldn't figure out the etymology of a couple of those bits)

[Prinsessa]

North-the. c;

[Lambuzhao]

Indeed, there's no question that things will be weird even with a logography. An English speaker reading other languages would regularly have to deal with sentences like, "Stakeholm are Swederike's headstead and land-the cultural, political, medial, economish centre. It are Swederike's so-well some Norden's folkrichest tightort."

(Forgive me, I couldn't figure out the etymology of a couple of those bits)

Happy to help -

Stakeholm are Swederike's headstead and land-the hot-bed of folklore-fostering, rikemootship , broadcasting, wealth-dealing. It are Swederike's so-well some Norden's folkwealthiest tightnook.

- Well you kno that I speak shamlang Anglish anyway.

[HinGambleGoth]

Well you shouldn't have are there, since that would be äro in Swedish, är is cognate with is and the English "be" lacks a cognate in Swedish, it should be something like "weze" i reckon.

Directoversetting from German to Swedish works better, the unused Swedish case system even has more distinctions than the German one, modern Swedish with fully declined nouns, articles and adjectives would be an interesting experiment.

[Ephraim]

If the writing system was first developed for Proto-Germanic or some early Germanic language, I think it makes sense to use the logograms for a root rather than for full-fledged words. The old Indo-European structure of root-suffix was still quite transperent in Proto-Germanic, Proto-Norse and Gothic, although the derivational suffixes and inflectional endings were somewhat fused. The ablaut grade and umlaut would be somewhat, if not fully, predictable from the suffix/inflection.

For example, Old Icelandic have a lot of words derived from a Germanic root *geb- (from PIE gʰebʰ- or the like). These could be written with the same root character, or a few characters (perhaps there's a new root *geft-):
gefa v ‘to give’ (< *geb-aną)
gæfa noun ‘luck’ (not quite sure about the derivation but apparently related, could probably come from *gēb-ijǭ)
gjǫf noun ‘gift’ (< *geb-ō)
gipt noun ‘gift’ (< *gif-tiz)
gipta verb ‘to give a woman in marriage; to marry’’ (derived from the noun gipt)
gipting noung ‘marriage’ (derived from the verb gipta)
gæfr adj ‘gentle’ (< *gēb-iz)
gáfa noun ‘gift’ (< *gēb-ǭ, possibly borrowed from Low German)

Some words that are not actually related might still use the same root character, of course, due to phonetic similarity. At least in West Germanic, the verb bear (< *ber-aną) and the noun bear (< *ber-ô) look like they share a root.

The older Indo-European languages that had a partially logographic writing system (like Hittite and Luwian) usually writes the endings separately, I think.

tightort.

Ort is borrowed from a Middle Low German or Middle High German word with the basic meaning ‘sharp point’, from PG *uzdaz. There is a dialectal English word ord or orde of the same origin, with the meaning ‘point, especially point of origin or the point or edge of a weapon’. It can also mean a ‘high point of land’. There is also a native Swedish word udd of the same origin. This is related to English odd which is a borrowing from Old Norse.

Writing these words can be quite interesting: Swedish – a North Germanic language – inherited udd and borrowed ort from West Germanic, while English – a West Germanic language – inherited ord and borrowed odd from North Germanic.

I see no reason why plural should be written out phonetically. Egyptian, for example, wrote plural either by tripling the glyph or by using three lines similar to what I did here. Among grammatical endings, I think pluralization is a fairly transparent and easily marked this way.

For the masculine and feminine ideographs, I used simplified versions of the characters for man and woman (posited to be simplified; I never actually designed unsimplified forms). Other endings make sense to be phonetic. For example, the glyph I used for the accusative ending is just the <n> rune.

Many Germanic languages, especially the older ones, have fused case and number endings so a plural marker doesn't really make sense. There were up to six plural forms which are not obviously related to each other and which had different forms for different noun. There was some syncretism (like nominative and vocative plural for all nouns, genitive singular and nominative plural for some) which increased greatly in the later stages of the languages.

You could of course mark case and number with separate agglutinative symbols, and this would be quite practical. But for such a system to develop, a certain level of sophistication is required when it comes to grammatical analysis. Someone needs to identify the different cases and numbers and the forms of a noun associated with them. There also needs to be the infrastructure to teach the concepts of case and number to all scribes. Proto-Germanic proper (the last stage before the separation of East and Northwest Germanic) was probably spoken in Northern Europe around 525 BC (based on Mikko K. Heikkilä's dating of the shift *ē > *ā in Nortwest Germanic) which is centuries before Pāṇini and Dionysius Thrax.

I'm still not quite clear on what the goals are here, but if it is a naturalistic writing system originally used for Proto-Germanic proper (or some other early stage of Germanic), I don't think it's realistic to have abstract case and number characters for the early languages at least. I even doubt that abstract fused case-number characters with no phonetic value in themselves (which is what I suggested earlier) would have developed in Northen Europe in 525 BC.

On the other hand, if the goal isn't naturalism, I think fused abstract case-number characters would be very practical. The languages that don't have case could simply use the nominative forms in all situations.

Egyptian did have dedicated number markers (as I pointed out in the same post) but it did not have case, from what we can tell, and there was really only two phonetic forms (a masculine and a feminine). Still, I think the plural marker was sometimes used for it's phonetic value too, even if the noun was not actually plural. From what I can tell, verb inflection was not written with abstract grammatical characters.

Hieroglyphic Luwian and Hittite, which have a lot in common with older Germanic in terms of inflection (such as the presence of a marked nominative singular), seem to have used phonetic characters for inflectional endings. Hittite might have used Sumerian plurals for native words, though, I'm not sure exactly how that worked.

[Prinsessa]

Wouldn't using only the accusative be more accurate for certain modern varieties (with possible exceptions, especially in the pronouns)?

[Ephraim]

Wouldn't using only the accusative be more accurate for certain modern varieties (with possible exceptions, especially in the pronouns)?

I assume you're referring to modern Continental North Germanic. Yes, the singular of strong masculine nouns look like they are from the accusative. On the other hand, it may just be that the nominative singular ending was lost which could be indicated by not having an inflectional character at all. Weak masculine nouns may be from either the nominative (Swedish båge < boghi) or the accusative (Swedish låga < loghi) but weak feminine nouns are generally from the nominative (gata). The definite plurals in Swedish masculine nouns look like they are a combination of nominative and accusative. The indefinite endings are from the nominative but the definite suffix -na might be from the accusative.

[clawgrip]

Indeed, there's no question that things will be weird even with a logography. An English speaker reading other languages would regularly have to deal with sentences like, "Stakeholm are Swederike's headstead and land-the cultural, political, medial, economish centre. It are Swederike's so-well some Norden's folkrichest tightort."

(Forgive me, I couldn't figure out the etymology of a couple of those bits)

Happy to help -

Stakeholm are Swederike's headstead and land-the hot-bed of folklore-fostering, rikemootship , broadcasting, wealth-dealing. It are Swederike's so-well some Norden's folkwealthiest tightnook.

- Well you kno that I speak shamlang Anglish anyway.

Lambuzhao, that was Swedish, not Anglish. I just took the first two sentences from the Swedish Wikipedia's article on Stockholm, but read the characters with their English pronunciations instead of the Swedish ones.

[clawgrip]

Since my glyphs were rejected, I'd like to see someone else actually start making glyphs! Maybe it's just my opinion, but talking and talking about it won't get us very far.

Probably the best thing to do is: first, make up a fairly sizable set of glyphs for noun, verb, and adjective morphemes, especially those that are easy to represent pictographically or ideographically, next maybe use them unaltered to represent semantically and phonetically similar words, and then next, once you have enough of them, you can figure out how you can manipulate them to differentiate different words written with the same glyphs, and how to mark declensions, conjugations, conjunctions, and so on. This is the most likely course of evolution for a logographic script anyway.

EDIT: Due to the inflecting nature of Germanic languages, it may be impossible to get a fully Chinese style script. It may end up more akin to Korean mixed script vs. Japanese script, e.g.:

悠久한 歷史와 傳統에 빛나는 우리 大韓國民은 3·1 運動으로 建立된 大韓民國臨時政府의 法統과 不義에 抗拒한 4·19 民主理念을 繼承하고
悠久な歴史と伝統に輝く私たちの大韓国民は、3・1運動に建立された大韓民国臨時政府の法統と不義に抗した4・19民主理念を継承し、

Except that the phonetic parts would be shared.

[Thrice Xandvii]

Yeah I was thinking there'd be a system in which roots all have their own glyph or set of glyphs, and then grammatical endings would be not ideographic in nature but instead relate the sound values they used in Proto-Germanic which as the æons passed would probably lose their sound value nd become abstract representatives of case. Ablaut and such would likely go completely unmarked and only suffixes and prefixes would be spelled out. It seems to me that would make some sense as an old system.

In other words we'd have something like Japanese/Korean as Clawgrip said.

[clawgrip]

I was going to say that adaptation of phonetic signs to logographic signs would be unlikely, but then I realized that we have just that in English, to a limited extent. &, $, №, lb. oz., Rx, as well as a number of elements on the periodic table, like Au, Na, Fe, Cu, and so on, are never pronounced based on the letters that make them up.

The question is, what motivation would the various Germanic tribes have to preserve archaic inflections? Why would these phonetically written Proto-Germanic inflections get uniformly preserved as logographic inflectional glyphs rather than showing regular variation to match speech, as actually did happen in the spelling conventions of the Germanic languages in the real world? There is no central, Pan-Germanic authority or anything of any sort to encourage uniformity over legibility, and from what I can tell, Germanic grammatical inflections get streamlined as time passes, so using archaic forms as abbreviations is also maybe not possible. The only way it could work is if every single inflectional affix got an unanalyzable $-style ligature, which seems unlikely.

[Thrice Xandvii]

Well, perhaps they would calcify as the system loses ground to some other spelling convention? Or is the premise of this whole thing that that never would happen and we'd still use these PGLs (Proto-Germanic Logograms) today?

I suppose there's actually no reason why the phonetic signs wouldn't gradually evolve, I guess. They'd of course lag behind the spoken language... maybe even more so than is usual considering the time period we are talking about and how low literacy would likely have been.

[cntrational]

For comparison, Chinese (and maybe Egyptian, unsure) sometimes derived affixes from using words pronounced similarly with the affix. So Mandarin uses the symbol 儿 to indicate the suffix -r from 兒/儿 ér, the word for "child".

Thus:

Standard Mandarin: 趟 tāng [tʰaŋ˥˥]
Colloquial Beijing: 趟儿 tāngr [tʰɑ̃ɻ˥˥]

[clawgrip]

Egyptian uses rebus writing extensively. Spelling in Egyptian was not strict, and later varieties would use both old-fashioned spellings and spellings to reflect the more advanced form of the language. I also believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that 儿 is not used for this purpose in Chinese dialects that don't have that suffix. The important thing to remember here is that logograms used phonetically is normal, but phonograms used logographically is unusual. The status of the runic alphabet needs to be determined. Are they semantic radicals/determiners/ideographs with no pronunciation, are they logograms that can be used phonetically for rebus writing (like 儿, or pretty much any Chinese characters), or are they an evolved, dedicated supplementary alphabet (like hiragana)?

[Lao Kou]

For comparison, Chinese sometimes derived affixes from using words pronounced similarly with the affix. So Mandarin uses the symbol 儿 to indicate the suffix -r from 兒/儿 ér, the word for "child".

Thus:

Standard Mandarin: 趟 tàng [tʰaŋ˥˩]
Colloquial Beijing: 趟儿 tàngr [tʰɑ̃ɻ˥˩]

Well, yes, but they didn't just pull the 兒/儿 character out of their tukhus strictly for phonetic value. In Beijingland, it has a similar diminutive-as-disambiguator function that 子 or 仔 (Mandarin: zǎi; Canto: zái; Taiwan: à) has. So that affix really is an affix, not just a similarly pronounced glom-on (as compared to, say, the 尔 ěr of 康奈尔大学 (kāngnàiěr dàxué = Cornell University).

Edit: Ninja'd:

I also believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that 儿 is not used for this purpose in Chinese dialects that don't have that suffix.

(For dialects that don't do final -r, that phonetic value is lost; it's merely an indicator to non-Beijing Mandarin speakers that you're in Bejing Mandarin territory using that equivalent diminutive-as-disambiguator thingy. Similarly, I think the Taiwanese (Minnan) 仔 is an indicator you're in Minnan territory for diminutive-as-disambiguator (though this is more an ateji thing, I think), but I doubt the average Bejing Mandarin speaker would know it has the value of à in these contexts.)

[Ephraim]

Derivational and inflectional suffixes in Proto-Germanic Proper are phonetically simpler than root-morphemes and prefixes. There is no short vowel *e except before *r (where I don't think it contrasted with *i), there are only a few clusters and only a subset of the consonants are used. I think it's mostly *j, *w, *s, *z, *r, *m, *n, *t, *d, *þ, possibly *l. There are overlong vowels, though, which don't really occur in roots.

Endings could have the following vowels:
Short: *i *u *a (*e before *r)
Long: *ī *ē *ō *ū
Overlong *ô (rarely *ê)

At a later stage, unstressed *ā was introduced from earlier *-aja- and in the suffix *-ārijaz borrowed from Latin.

The final nasal vowels of later Proto-Germanic (as found on Wiktionary) developed from older words ending in *-n, probably still pronounced as such in Proto-Germanic Proper. After the development of nasal vowels, final *-nt simplified to *-n.

There is some ablaut in the suffixes but at the Proto-Germanic stage, it's not as transparent as in the root.

It is possible that you could get by just writing the consonants of the endings, and maybe only the long vowels. The vowels of the inflectional syllables do carry quite a bit of information. On the other hand, the unstressed short vowels were to a large extent lost in the later Germanic languages and although this lead to a lot of syncretism, the languages managed to remain heavily inflected for some time.

——

Here's one idea: At the stage of Proto-Germanic proper (ca 525 BC), some characters came to be used semi-alphabetically. They could represent consonants, long/overlong vowels and a few common clusters, with the short vowels left unwritten. These were used for inflectional endings. They may originate from logograms for words beginning with or containing these sounds, compare the names of the runes.

Sometime around the first centuries AD, all Germanic languages lost the second short vowel in disyllabic inflectional endings. These included the infinitive *-anan > *-aną > *-an, personal endings like *-izi > *-iz and the dative plural *-amaz > *-amz. At this stage, sequences of two characters that represented one syllable would be written as a compound glyph or a ligature of some kind. For example, the infinitive *-an would be written as a n=n compound/ligature (I indicate this with an equal sign, a hypen indicates a character boundary).

The verb *beranan could be written something like this:
Infinitive: *ber-n=n
*ek ber-ō (*berō > berō or beru)
*þū ber-z (*berizi > *birizi > *biriz)
*iz ber-d (*beridi > *biridi > *birid)
*wet ber-ō=z (*berōz > *berōz)
*jut ber-d=z (*beradiz > *beradz)
*wīz ber-m=z (*beramaz > *beramz)
*jūz ber-d (*berid > *biridi > *birid)
*īz ber-nd (*berandi > *berand)

The inflectional characters would remain as kind of a mix between phonetic and logographic character. I imagine that Old Icelandic would write the above word the same way, except it would write *ber-z for the 3sg. The 1sg –ō would be silent but probably still written. The infinitive -n=n would be pronounced indentically (pronounced /a/, nasalized at an earlier stage) to the 3.sg -nd but it's possible that they could be distinguished in writing (for some verbs, the forms differ). Also, the dual inflection would simply be lost and replaced by the plural.

The word masculine a-stem *wulfaz could be declined as such:
case: singular — plural
nom: *wulf-z — *wulf-ō=z
voc: *wulf — *wulf-ō=z
acc: *wulf-n — *wulf–nz
dat: *wulf-j — *wulf–m=z
ins: *wulf-ō — *wulf–m=z
gen: *wulf-s — *wulf–ō=n

The feminine ō-stem *gebō could be something like:
nom: *geb-ō — *geb-ō=z
voc: *geb-ō — *geb-ō=z
acc: *geb-ō=n — *geb-ō=z
dat: *geb-ō=j — *geb–ō=m=z
ins: *geb-ō — *geb–ō=m=z
gen: *geb-ō=z — *geb–ō=n

The question is, what motivation would the various Germanic tribes have to preserve archaic inflections? Why would these phonetically written Proto-Germanic inflections get uniformly preserved as logographic inflectional glyphs rather than showing regular variation to match speech, as actually did happen in the spelling conventions of the Germanic languages in the real world? There is no central, Pan-Germanic authority or anything of any sort to encourage uniformity over legibility, and from what I can tell, Germanic grammatical inflections get streamlined as time passes, so using archaic forms as abbreviations is also maybe not possible. The only way it could work is if every single inflectional affix got an unanalyzable $-style ligature, which seems unlikely.

That is a good question, of course. Obviously, the world in which these logograms developed is different from the real world in some way. Perhaps there was a more centralized authority, perhaps there was an important pre-Christian religious text written in Proto-Germanic which continued to be spelled the same way, while the pronunciation changed. Perhaps the details are not that important for the project, we just have to assume that there was some motivation for the development of the system.

But in general, I don't think the later languages should preserve inflection in writing if they don't do it in speech. That is, I don't think English should be written as if the nouns had case because at that point, you're not really writing English. However, the characters used to represent archaic inflection might remain but become generalized. The character once pronounced *-ōz or *-ōs (I think there was some dialectal variation but perhaps they still used the same character) may have become a general plural marker in English, at least for the s-plural but it could in principle be used even for other plurals.

I don't think there's any word that comes from Proto-Germanic blak- in German.

There was an Old High German word blah which would be Blach in modern German. I think it only survived in compounds such as Blachfrost 'black frost' (more often called Kahlfrost, I think). Blach also survived as a name on it's own, and in part of names such as Blachmann.

[HinGambleGoth]

That is a good question, of course. Obviously, the world in which these logograms developed is different from the real world in some way.

I have always been bothered by the Elder futhark, it was a pretty well-developed writing system for Germanic, yet there wasn't that much written at all (at least what we have found so far), something tells me that it was used more extensively than we might think.

perhaps there was an important pre-Christian religious text written in Proto-Germanic which continued to be spelled the same way, while the pronunciation changed.

I was thinking in similar terms, a Germanic counterpart to classical Latin , still used alongside the vernacular spoken language that later split up into Norse, English etc much like how Latin split into French, Spanish and so on.

I don't see what it would be used for though, since Germanic paganism was a pretty "loose" collection of myths and gods, that changed over time, lacking a "canon".

I could imagine it being used to record laws and alliterative poetry, but the meter (which was used in both) would be broken by all the sound changes.

[Lambuzhao]

Indeed, there's no question that things will be weird even with a logography. An English speaker reading other languages would regularly have to deal with sentences like, "Stakeholm are Swederike's headstead and land-the cultural, political, medial, economish centre. It are Swederike's so-well some Norden's folkrichest tightort."

(Forgive me, I couldn't figure out the etymology of a couple of those bits)

Happy to help -

Stakeholm are Swederike's headstead and land-the hot-bed of folklore-fostering, rikemootship , broadcasting, wealth-dealing. It are Swederike's so-well some Norden's folkwealthiest tightnook.

- Well you kno that I speak shamlang Anglish anyway.

Lambuzhao, that was Swedish, not Anglish. I just took the first two sentences from the Swedish Wikipedia's article on Stockholm, but read the characters with their English pronunciations instead of the Swedish ones.

Didn't have to. The Stakeholm ar and It ar gave it away.

[Lambuzhao]

[quote="Ephraim"]Derivational and inflectional suffixes in Proto-Germanic Proper are phonetically simpler than root-morphemes and prefixes. There is no short vowel *e except before *r (where I don't think it contrasted with *i), there are only a few clusters and only a subset of the consonants are used. I think it's mostly *j, *w, *s, *z, *r, *m, *n, *t, *d, *þ, possibly *l. There are overlong vowels, though, which don't really occur in roots.

Endings could have the following vowels:
Short: *i *u *a (*e before *r)
Long: *ī *ē *ō *ū
Overlong *ô (rarely *ê)

At a later stage, unstressed *ā was introduced from earlier *-aja- and in the suffix *-ārijaz borrowed from Latin.

The final nasal vowels of later Proto-Germanic (as found on Wiktionary) developed from older words ending in *-n, probably still pronounced as such in Proto-Germanic Proper. After the development of nasal vowels, final *-nt simplified to *-n.

There is some ablaut in the suffixes but at the Proto-Germanic stage, it's not as transparent as in the root.

It is possible that you could get by just writing the consonants of the endings, and maybe only the long vowels. The vowels of the inflectional syllables do carry quite a bit of information. On the other hand, the unstressed short vowels were to a large extent lost in the later Germanic languages and although this lead to a lot of syncretism, the languages managed to remain heavily inflected for some time.

——

Here's one idea: At the stage of Proto-Germanic proper (ca 525 BC), some characters came to be used semi-alphabetically. They could represent consonants, long/overlong vowels and a few common clusters, with the short vowels left unwritten. These were used for inflectional endings. They may originate from logograms for words beginning with or containing these sounds, compare the names of the runes.

Sometime around the first centuries AD, all Germanic languages lost the second short vowel in disyllabic inflectional endings. These included the infinitive *-anan > *-aną > *-an, personal endings like *-izi > *-iz and the dative plural *-amaz > *-amz. At this stage, sequences of two characters that represented one syllable would be written as a compound glyph or a ligature of some kind. For example, the infinitive *-an would be written as a n=n compound/ligature (I indicate this with an equal sign, a hypen indicates a character boundary).

The verb *beranan could be written something like this:
Infinitive: *ber-n=n
*ek ber-ō (*berō > berō or beru)
*þū ber-z (*berizi > *birizi > *biriz)
*iz ber-d (*beridi > *biridi > *birid)
*wet ber-ō=z (*berōz > *berōz)
*jut ber-d=z (*beradiz > *beradz)
*wīz ber-m=z (*beramaz > *beramz)
*jūz ber-d (*berid > *biridi > *birid)
*īz ber-nd (*berandi > *berand)

The inflectional characters would remain as kind of a mix between phonetic and logographic character. I imagine that Old Icelandic would write the above word the same way, except it would write *ber-z for the 3sg. The 1sg –ō would be silent but probably still written. The infinitive -n=n would be pronounced indentically (pronounced /a/, nasalized at an earlier stage) to the 3.sg -nd but it's possible that they could be distinguished in writing (for some verbs, the forms differ). Also, the dual inflection would simply be lost and replaced by the plural.

The word masculine a-stem *wulfaz could be declined as such:
case: singular — plural
nom: *wulf-z — *wulf-ō=z
voc: *wulf — *wulf-ō=z
acc: *wulf-n — *wulf–nz
dat: *wulf-j — *wulf–m=z
ins: *wulf-ō — *wulf–m=z
gen: *wulf-s — *wulf–ō=n

The feminine ō-stem *gebō could be something like:
nom: *geb-ō — *geb-ō=z
voc: *geb-ō — *geb-ō=z
acc: *geb-ō=n — *geb-ō=z
dat: *geb-ō=j — *geb–ō=m=z
ins: *geb-ō — *geb–ō=m=z
gen: *geb-ō=z — *geb–ō=n

[quote="clawgrip"]The question is, what motivation would the various Germanic tribes have to preserve archaic inflections? Why would these phonetically written Proto-Germanic inflections get uniformly preserved as logographic inflectional glyphs rather than showing regular variation to match speech, as actually did happen in the spelling conventions of the Germanic languages in the real world?
...

But in general, I don't think the later languages should preserve inflection in writing if they don't do it in speech. That is, I don't think English should be written as if the nouns had case because at that point, you're not really writing English. However, the characters used to represent archaic inflection might remain but become generalized. The character once pronounced *-ōz or *-ōs (I think there was some dialectal variation but perhaps they still used the same character) may have become a general plural marker in English, at least for the s-plural but it could in principle be used even for other plurals.
[quote]

That makes sense to a certain point. Certainly, just like there was an Elder and Younger Futhark, and Traditional/Modern Hanzi, I wouldn't doubt that there would have developed Elder and Younger Logograms as well. That would ring true to me.
Also -
1) I don't know enough about Mayan, but as far as Ancient Egyptian goes, from what we can tell, they did not do a precise
"every inflection must be realized in glyphs" representation of their language. There are still questions concerning 'Is it an active masculine participle or passive construction' somesuch. As with most natlangs, you were supposed to get it from context. Cuneiform langs like Akkadian were somewhat better at spelling things out.

I don't know why an Elder Germanic logolang would be much different/that much more precise.

2) IMHO the 'classic' alphabetical runes would be used kana -like to write inflections a la Japanese hiragana, etc.