The Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, is a runic alphabet and a reduced form of the Elder Futhark, with only 16 characters, in use from about the 9th century, after a "transitional period" during the 7th and 8th centuries.The reduction, somewhat paradoxically, happened at the same time as phonetic changes that led to a greater number of different phonemes in the …

Algiz (also Elhaz) is the name conventionally given to the "z-rune" ᛉ of the Elder Futhark runic alphabet.Its transliteration is z, understood as a phoneme of the Proto-Germanic language, the terminal *z continuing Proto-Indo-European terminal *s.. It is one of two runes which express a phoneme that does not occur word-initially, and thus could not be named acrophonically, the …