To honor them I want to tattoo the word защищающихся on my back / to engrave onto my bike / to carve it on my bat. Now imagine some Russian guy who shows up and says: “Hi, my ancestors were Germans who emigrated to the US and then to Russia. This method no longer works, since all native Proto Norse and Old Norse speakers are long dead. The only criterion of correctness was the fact that people could actually understand what the inscription said. Everyone carved runes as he or she deemed truly good and right. The Viking Age did not produce any accepted chart of such correspondences (even between the sounds of the Old Norse language and runes, which would be spelling, let alone the modern English sounds or letters and Viking runes, which would be transliteration). Neither of two is feasible for Old Norse. Did Carroll write it correctly? There are two ways to check it: a) finding a universally accepted chart of correspondences between Russian and English letters b) showing the word to some Russian guy and asking him if he can understand it. The Russian word has 12 letters, the English one as many as 30. Lewis Carroll while travelling in Russia liked the word защищающихся (meaning ‘those who protect themselves’ as he noted in his diary) and wrote it down in English: zаshtshееshtshауоushtshееkhsуа. No kind of correctness standard may be applied to the Viking Age runic inscriptions, at least in the current state of research. You also cannot represent anything in runes correctly. Runes are not a language, they are signs devised to represent the sounds of a language, the same way as letters. You cannot translate anything into runes, full stop.
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