Talk:Proto-Norse language

message: I will flesh out this article some more once I've managed to get som sleep... --Asdfgl 22:09, 16 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: fleshing out article

message: From what I undestand, there are a group of languages called Norse languages, and 2 groups within Norse languages known as West Norse languages and East Norse languages. I'm not sure whether or not all North Germanic languages are Norse languages or not.
:Pretty correct! North Germanic equals Norse - the term Norse seems to be treated approximately as the "Conscandinavian" (I invented that word now - don't use it as a term!) word Nordisk when referring to c:a 700-1100 AD. The common opinion of Nordic linguistics is that, there are two Norse languages in the linguist sense, East Nordic, and West Nordic. I was going to write an extensive explanation here, but it may suffice that I claim that this family tree of the Nordic Languages is what I've been taught and expericenced - with the exception: the distinction between the Sveamål and the Götamål has disolved so much that practically they're just pronunciation variants of the same dialect. Also the status of Gutnish in relation to Swedish is disputed - my personal non-professional opinion is that Gutnish is a third group beside East and West Norse. User:Rursus 09:31, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No. You must have meant that "north germanic and nordic" are pretty much synonymous, which is perfectly true. User:Rursus 09:31, 9 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Norse languages

message: Just want to criticize the interpretation of the Kragehul spear: it's not mine, but taken from "Runristningar - Från spjutspetsen i Stabu till Anna i Älvdalen - FABEL I KLASSIKER", . As not entirely unusual, a part of the translation is ridiculous: gagaga ginuga == ga-ga-ga, super-ga. Very informative, or: when ideas are lacking resort to some undeterminable magic we cannot reconstruct. I instead claim gagaga ginuga == gagangan, ginunga, some n:s forgotten or customary omitted. gagangan, ginunga == walked far. I.e.: I the eril of Asgisl, (have) walked far, .... This is original "research" however. If you find a doctor who interprets unlike what's in the current text, then the text can be rewritten - otherwise, I'm not a linguist. Twirling his moustaches, does: Rursus 16:19, 9 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It is sadly a well established fact that runecarvers used single-rune abbreviations, magical ones usually repeated. One example is the triple T as a magical invocation of Tyr, that's at least a likely interpretation given some of the contexts in which it is found. Most of the interpretations of the gaga-ginuga are just that, ga-ga. It's ridiculous to use mental resources and paper on discussions on something that just cannot any longer be established as fact. The meaning is lost, it cannot be reestablished, especially since the vocabulary items to which it may have originally referred may have been lost. The only interpretation worth mentioning is the one single interpretation which is (a tiny bit) more supportable than the rest, namely that the runes refer to the word for which the runes are named, in this case Gebô and Ansuz > Gift (of) Aesir.--AkselGerner (talk) 20:57, 7 April 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, then someone should try to simply match the Tune Runestone with a Gothic dictionary. I've done it and I got þrijoz dohtriz dalidun arbija, "three daughters divided the inheritance", not the version of the article. I still think the academic circles haven't followed common sense and minimalist interpretations. ... said: Rursus (Bork, Bork!) 19:51, 2 January 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Too bad that Proto-Norse is not Gothic (some 700–1000 years of divergence can introduce a lot of misleading homonymies), context cannot be ignored, and experts are no ignorant fools. Ottar Grønvik has suggested "Three daughters made a good funeral feast (as the best loved of the inheritors)" – still no straight Gothic interpretation. Laypeople who insist they know better than all the experts and read ancient inscriptions using a dictionary in an (at best) only loosely related language are known as crackpots. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 16:52, 7 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Kragehul absurdity

message: I have a question for all the proto-norse experts out there.
I've studied Old Norse in Norway, and in the process have had a rough introduction to proto-Norse. I am also very interested in Runes, and have therefore read a couple of books about runes. In all the Norwegian literature I have read, the letter which is in this article written z, is written R, and described as a retroflex r-sound. And, of course, it evolved into the r in Old Norse. Why is the R not used in this article? Is it a case of the Norwegian academic community disagreeing with the rest of the world? Or is it, simply, an omission?--Barend (talk) 09:00, 17 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: The reason is that it is regarded in protogermanic as a retroflex voiced sibilant or the like that gradually converted to the sound you mentioned in the north germanic branch. There is little basis for assuming that the change would have happened at this time, but also little basis for assuming that it hadn't. The cautious approach is to use the "phoneme" z that can be tracked to proto-germanic, since the runic script bears so much more likeness to that language than to Old Norse, a note can be made of the transition this element's phonetic correlation went through. A useful solution would be to line up the historical developments side by side in a chart. On the left the protogermanic (the "before" state), in the middle the runes and the phonetic values they are assumed to refer to, and on the right the corresponding phonological elements of Old Norse (the "after" state).--AkselGerner (talk) 21:04, 17 March 2008 (UTC)

text: The Proto-Germanic phoneme was most probably phonetically an apico-alveolar [z̺] (see pp. 45ff.). The most plausible phonetic development from there, in my opinion, would be an alveolar approximant [ɹ], which is often apical as well; this could be the transitional stage appearing some time in the Proto-Norse period (and into the Runic Swedish period, apparently; the details of the dating of the North Germanic rhotacism and its stages are difficult, therefore I think it's best to write  in Proto-Norse), which was confused, conflated or identified with /r/, until it eventually merged with the /r/ phoneme of North Germanic. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:30, 7 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  -z/-R 

message: I see that the term primitive norse is used here. What is the reason for this term? As far as I understand proto-norse was even more grammatically advanced/complex than classical norse. --Oddeivind (talk) 16:19, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Primitive is here used in the sense of "from which something is derived, primary", which is the original meaning of the word, and not in the sense of "simple, underdeveloped." –Holt  (T•C) 16:58, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes. It's common to call forms of a language older than the "Old" form "Primitive" if they're actually attested (and "Proto" if they're only reconstructed). Another example is Primitive Irish, which is older than Old Irish. —Angr 18:38, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: As Proto-Norse is partly reconstructed and partly attested, "Primitive" and "Proto-" can be used as seen fit. –Holt  (T•C) 18:56, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, and two aspects of the prefix ur- in urnordisk(a) are represented in English :).--Berig (talk) 19:15, 25 February 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Honestly, I'm not sure there is a single standard term in English-language scholarship. I'm sure I've seen Proto-, Primitive, Archaic, and others.  Part of the problem may be that the corpus of whatever we call it is relatively small, so we might easily have to talk about both attested examples and reconstructed examples from what is, at least notionally, the same language, and so having to switch back and forth amongst strict distinctions of Proto and Primitive or whatever is not overly convenient (and potentially confusing to the reader). I'm not sure most English-speaking scholars are too bothered by precisely which term is used, since it tends to be pretty clear what we're talking about.  Still, a once-upon-a-time colleague of mine, Martin Syrett, wrote a monograph for NOWELE titled The Unaccented Vowels of Proto-Norse‎, which suggests to me that current title Proto-Norse is a perfectly acceptable as a general label to English-speaking scholarship, even if other terms with Primitive, etc. might be also. Carlsefni (talk) 15:44, 20 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''Primitive'' norse 

message: Article Proto-Norse language should be renamed in only Proto-Norse --MilanKovacevic (talk) 00:55, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: It's not Proto anything - there are runic inscriptions, so it's not a reconstruction of a hypothesized parent. --Pfold (talk) 19:35, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

text: Agreed. There's no other "Proto-Norse" thing to disambiguate the language from, as with Old Church Slavonic. — Eru·tuon 19:16, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

text: Agree – Proto-Norse redirects here, and per WP:NCL this means that the disambiguator "language" is unnecessary. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:42, 9 December 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Title 

message: This article goes quite deep when it comes phonology, but it says next to nothing about Proto-Norse grammar. Of course not much can be said with certainty since the language is so poorly attested, but I guess authors have elaborated on questions like "did Proto-Norse still have an instrumental case" or "did Proto-Norse preserve the mediopassive", questions that spring to mind when we compare proto-Norse to Gothic and the early West Germanic languages. Steinbach (talk) 10:43, 18 August 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: From what I understand, the grammar is very similar to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic grammar, but I can't be entirely sure since most sources on Proto Norse are prohibitively expensive to buy and look into. Reboot01 (talk) 6:12, 7 December 2019 (UTC)

text: Krause doesn't mention any form that (he says) could be interpreted as an instrumental case (in fact, on p. 48f., Krause 1971 says explicitly that there is no case in the inscriptions where a noun in an instrumental case form would be syntactically expected, and therefore it is completely uncertain if Proto-Norse still had separate instrumental forms like West Germanic), and the only mediopassive form would be haite(-ka) 'I am called'. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:02, 8 December 2019 (UTC)

text: An overview of the attested endings would certainly be nice. Rua (mew) 12:04, 8 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: We do have Proto-Norse inscriptions, some of which are rather long, and I believe there are books on the subject, they're just hard to find and very expensive, so I don't think it would be impossible to at least create a tentative grammar of Proto-Norse from what we have on here? --Reboot01 (talk) 3:28, 31 December 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: Krause (1971) does have a grammar sketch (pp. 46–54, pp. 101–134), but it's fairly succinct, and culminates in a listing of attested and reconstructed noun and verb forms on pp. 123–128. These books are quite old and I believe can be found elsewhere if you know where to look. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:01, 4 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Grammar