𐳠

ep

a sound, not a word

The consonant p, one character for one sound

Glyphs are shown in Unicode and laid out left to right. Both scripts are written right to left, so these rows are a convenience rather than a facsimile.

Sound
p /p/
Position
31
Group
Consonants
Unicode
U+10CE0

The letter

ep carries /p/. It is one character for one sound, which is the organising principle of the whole alphabet: every distinct Hungarian phoneme has its own letter, with no digraphs and no diacritics doing double duty.

Rovás is written right to left, so this letter appears further left in a word than a reader used to Latin will expect.

Names and recitation

Consonants in this alphabet are recited with a leading e — eb, ec, ed, ef, eg rather than bé, cé, dé — and that convention has a consequence. Because the vowel e is already inside every consonant's name, historical carvers left e and é out of words almost entirely.

Other vowels were written when they ended a word, when two fell together, or when omission would create ambiguity. Modern Rovás abandons the practice and writes everything, because its purpose is transliteration rather than economy.

It does not mean anything

This is worth stating plainly, because visitors arriving from the Germanic runes expect otherwise.

Rovás letters have no meanings. ep is a name for a sound, not a word — the consonant with a vowel put in front of it so it can be said aloud. There is no rune poem for this alphabet, no kenning tradition, no ideographic layer, and no equivalent of the Stentoften stone using a letter to stand for a concept.

That is a sharper position than the Germanic runes are in. Rune divination is modern, but the runes at least carry names meaning cattle, hail and ice, with medieval poems attached. Rovás letters are letters.

Frequently asked questions

/p/. It is a single character for a single Hungarian phoneme, which is how the whole alphabet works — no digraphs, and no diacritics doing double duty.

Consonants in this alphabet are recited with a leading e — eb, ec, ed rather than bé, cé, dé. The name is the sound with a vowel in front of it so it can be pronounced.

No. Rovás letters are purely phonetic. Their names — eb, ec, ed and so on — are recitation aids, the consonant with a leading vowel, not words. There is no rune poem, no kenning tradition and no ideographic layer, which puts the script in a weaker position for divination than the Germanic runes.

Rovás

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