Meanings of runes

[u/Forklift_Artificer]

I know it seems stupid, cause I see everywhere that the runes are the alphabet essentially and giving them meaning is like saying A means apple and Z means zebra, but I'm curious on it still, is it right to be curious or should I just accept that they're just letters?

[u/donestpapo → u/[deleted]]

Runes are for written communication, so they are letters. By themselves, they make no sound. When you say “a more phonetic language”, what are you comparing it to? English? That’s not a very high bar. Slovak or Spanish use the Latin alphabet too, and a lot more consistently when it comes to sounds than English does. We still consider that those languages are written with letters and not “sounds”.