Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
Subject: Re: Vikings savages
From: canders@isr.harvard.edu (Carl E. Anderson)
Date: Wed, 12 Aug 92 19:35:43 GMT
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

In article <1992Aug11.222910.18582@corax.udac.uu.se> pem@Minsk.DoCS.UU.SE (Per-Erik Martin) writes:
>In article <1992Aug11.165325.20936@burrhus.harvard.edu> canders@isr.harvard.edu (Carl E. Anderson) writes:
>>>It's also possible that difference wasn't important to the people of
>>>that time. They used the same rune, 'k', for both 'k' and 'g'.
>>>(I guess it's "viga" in (old) Icelandic which is used as a reference
>>> to Old Norse, but I'm not sure you can bet on that it actually was
>>> pronounced 'g' in Old Norse.)
>
>>	   I've done a little work on this subject, and as far as I can tell
>>they _did_ distinguish between sounds despite having a 16 character
>>alphabet, and recognized the limitations.  I haven't got the reference with
>>me now, but on one of the "Ingvar" stones in Sweden, "[they] died" is
>>rendered in runes "tuu" where as proper Old Norse would spell it "dou".
>
>I have. ;-)  S| 173 Tystberga.
>"han hafDi ystarla um uaRit linkit : tuu a ustarla meD inkuari"
>(He had been in the west for a long time. They died in the east with Ingvar."

	Ha!  You are way ahead of me :)  Yes, that's the one - well done!

>>	   I took this to indicate that the carver understand the difference
>>in pronunciation between "o" and "u" but used the u-rune for both since he
>>did not have an "o"-rune.  I'm no expert though, and would be interested to
>>hear more on the matter.
>>	   Likewise, I believe that Old Norse differentiated between "k" and
>>"g".
>
>Oh, I know they distinguished between different sounds written with the
>same rune. I merely suggested that I'm not sure you can be sure to what
>extent for different sounds, and exactly which sound was used in some
>specific words. Sometimes you may be pretty sure (for example by comparing
>with early writings with Latin letters) and in some case you may not. I
>don't know about "vigi". Oh, one mustn't forget that the sound may have
>changed with time too, like going from a hard to a soft sound.
>(When I'm saying "you" can't be sure, I actually mean I can't be sure, of
>course. My Old Norse is a bit weak, I must admit... ;-)

	Well, you're quite right - lacking tape recordings of viking
conversation we can't be sure about these things.  However I am given to
understand that be comparing examples from poetry (where sound is quite
important) we can get a pretty good idea of what things sounded like.  I'll
admit that this is hardly my specialty but it seems fairly reasonable.  
	I'm not sure where this leaves us with "vigi" though :)

>Actually, it's generally believed that the sparse, 16 character futhark
>was a deliberate writing reform which someone probably put a great deal of
>careful work into (since it actually worked very well).
>It didn't "evolve" from the 24 character futhark, but appeared rather
>suddenly sometime around the year 800.

	That's interesting - I hadn't heard that, but in hindsight it makes
sense.

>The theory is that the language had evolved a number of new sounds rendering
>the old futhark more and more awkward to use (by the time it had been in use
>for about 600 years). The alternatives were either to introduce new runes
>(which happened with the Frisian and English futharks; the latter had 33 runes
>in the end), or to *reduce* the number of runes, using the same runes for
>different sounds. A pretty ingenious move if you ask me...

	Ah.  I knew about the new sounds which had evolved, but hadn't
though about the "reduction vs. expansion" idea.  An interesting analysis.
I kind of like it.

>Later this new futhark did evolve new runes anyway, by using "dotted"
>runes to distinguish between different sounds, and using different versions
>of the same rune to mean different sounds. (In the end they even mixed in
>some Latin characters, in Dalarna, Sweden, where the runes where used
>longer than anywhere else, up to the 19th century.)

	Interesting how they first reduced and then reexpanded.

Cheers,
Carl

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Carl Edlund Anderson	            	"Hefi ek ok aldri sva reitt vapn
canders@isr.harvard.edu			at manni at eigi hafi vidh kommit."
OR
anderso2@husc.harvard.edu			- Skarphedhinn Njalsson 
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Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic