This post makes far bigger deal of (somewhat) recent rune usage than it actually is in my opinion. It's not like this folk used hieroglyphic alphabet when the rest of the country used latin letters. Runes are basically the same thing as latin/cyrillic letters. Just one more phonetic alphabet with different shape of the letters. Well, and it's old. Nothing special about that, really. In fact, it could be more surprising that all germanic languages adopted latin alphabet so easily. Yeah, there's pretty clear explanation why this happened, but it could have happened the other way as well.
And local dialects are anything but unusual, they appear even in not so isolated regions of small european countries. Which is a lot less likely place for a local dialect to survive than northern Swedish forest is.
I think a couple things are important to consider here:
- Though it's just another alphabet, it was independently invented. This is pretty cool. Alphabets (and related Abjads) have only ever been invented historically very few times and t hey tend to be variations on a few earlier systems. It's not at all obvious that this is a way to encode sounds and many more cultures use syllabaries or abugida (2 of the three native Japanese systems) or some kind of logograph system (like Chinese). Even Tsalagi ended up turning Latin characters into a syllabary.
- Runes look like they're uniquely useful for scratching into wood, just like various scripts in Mesopotamia (like Ugaritic or Akkadian) work best when pressed into wet clay with a stylus and Arabic, Chinese and Korean work best written with a brush. It's interesting how different systems have kind of an optimal medium to work in.
Runes weren't independently invented. They were likely derived from Old Italic alphabets related to Latin. This is why many of the runic characters are graphically similar to their Latin equivalents.
It's unclear how much influence Old Italic alphabets had on the various Runics though it's generally thought that Etruscan was a shared ancestor. There's some theories that some of the similarities are the result of co-evolution or repurposing of found letter a la Tsalagi.
For example, Danish Futhark uses the character for 'm' that's used as 'ph' in Etruscan (later to become greek 'phi'), obviously not a morphological change but a repurposing.
Another example, Etruscan 'sh' seems to have disappeared due to confusion with a simplified 'M', which is similar to 'e' in Elder Futhark and 'i' in Gothenburg Runes.
These may have simply been "loan" glyphs, adopted to fill some phonological need, in the way that English doesn't have letters for 'sh', 'ch' or 'zh'.
Most of the morphology seems wholly unique in early Runic scripts, hinting at their uniqueness. But again, as Sequoyah demonstrated, loan characters often are used in more "obvious" ways like as a syllabary.
There's later forms of Runes that borrow more heavily from Latin scripts, and these also seem to be more regularized and simplified over the less standard earlier scripts.
> And local dialects are anything but unusual, they appear even in not so isolated regions of small european countries. Which is a lot less likely place for a local dialect to survive than northern Swedish forest is.
I was always amazed by the linguistic diversity in Italy, much of which is anything but isolated. Even in the plains of the Veneto, you can ride a bike far enough for the locals to tell that you're from a different area (without even looking at what's written on your jersey!).
I live in London, and you can tell South/East/North/West London apart with relatively little practice. On top of that there are several distinct dialects in the surrounding areas (1-2 hours travel out of inner London), as well as a few different sociolects (dialects spoken by distinct socio-economic groups more than separated by area).
In Norway, a 2h ferryboat trip can take you from a city where people speak fairly mainstream Norwegian to an island where the locals cannot be understood by most Norwegians (unless the locals make an effort and speak mainstream).
It's pretty funny that people were using runes 300 years after the first generation of antiquity freaks among the upper classes painstakingly learned them so they could decipher the old stones.
> And local dialects are anything but unusual, they appear even in not so isolated regions of small european countries.
The point is that it isn't a dialect, it's accepted by linguists as a separate language. Even though the Swedish government refuses to accept that, though in less painful ways than when they tried to beat it out of the schoolkids (which they did until the fifties).
> And local dialects are anything but unusual, they appear even in not so isolated regions of small european countries. Which is a lot less likely place for a local dialect to survive than northern Swedish forest is.
The letter Þ (Thorn) is in modern use in Icelandic, and directly derived from the runic alphabet.
Icelandic, by virtue of having been near completely isolated for hundreds of years, is also the modern language most closely related to old norse, in much the same way American english is closer to the english of the enlightenment than modern British english is.
You still find a remnant of thorn in English to: The "y" in "ye" (e.g "ye olde") is used in place of Thorn - "ye" is just "the" (and should be pronounced as "the").
They don't speak Old Norse, they simply didn't take part in as many changes as in Swedish. Älvdalska still sounds pretty Swedish and we have other North Germanic languages (Icelandic, Faroese) that also kept features that Swedish dropped.
> The runic script was the dominant written language
The runic script is a script and not a language. It's just another alphabet
> flooded by [...] Germanic words
It's a Germanic language in itself, maybe they mean low German loanwords.
> we have other North Germanic languages (Icelandic, Faroese)
I could well be wrong here (please correct me if I am).
Wasn't Old Norse divided into Eastern and Western? With Icelandic and Faroese related to Western Old Norse whilst Swedish descends from Eastern. This would imply that Älvdalska would be related to Eastern Old Norse - hence not totally unique but still of great interest.
Nowadays we have nation states and boundaries. We have a buraucracy, publishers and broadcasters located in the capital that influence the language spoken in that country. 500, 1000, 1500 years ago it wasn't quite like that. Things were more fluid.
Älvalska descends from whatever was spoken there, which was presumably closer to what was spoken in Uppsala at the time than to whatever was spoken in Hamar (in Norway some way west of Älvdalen). But there wasn't a ban on travel to Hamar, nor a state that lent prestige to the dialect spoken in the capital.
Yes it is. Old Gutnish is usually seen as an additional dialect of Old Norse.
I've only had a few courses about Old Norse, that were mainly about Old West Norse, so I'm not really an expert in this topic. I think we pretty much know the differences between Old Western Norse and Old Eastern Norse through the texts of that languages that were preserved.
Because of Johannes Bureus people see runes as some sort of magical alphabet, but really they are no different from any alphabet like Cyrillic, Latin, Hebrew, Coptic, etc.
I don't know about the website, but the mystical side of the runes is very old. In fact, the story about how the runes came to be is that Oden hung over the Well of Mimer (Mimer was a giant well versed in magic) for nine days and nine nights. In the end, he lost one of his eyes, but received the runes instead. The runes describe the world, so the world can be altered through the runes (the idea goes). Each rune describes an aspect of the world, like the Is-rune being both the sound "i"/"ee" and the concept of "ice".
Edit: like I wrote above, this is the STORY, ie the cultural myth about how they came to be. The STORY shows how they were THOUGHT OF as more than a practical language.
no, that is most definitely not how 'runes came to be'. as others have pointed out in this thread: there are practical, not mystical, reasons why runes used to be a thing and it's got nothing to do with giants...
It seems rather unlikely that if people were selling books of magic on the internet which actually worked we wouldn't know about it. People would talk about it, and they'd have the results to back up their talk when other people called them nuts.
When the Nordic Council becomes the Nordic Federation, I hope they re-invent Old Norse as New Norse as the official language of the Federation. You know, like they did with Hebrew when they re-declared Israel back in the 1940s.
In college, we'ed leave messages on friends whiteboards with runes. Back in '93, there weren't a lot of 'nerd' girls, so it was usually a pretty safe way to hide in plain sight. Much better than a tie on the doorknob. Granted, it wasn't Ultima or LOTR, but Beowulf in the Olde English class that we would cite, because nerdy wasn't cool back then.
One would expect it to be possible to #define most of the keywords and functions one would need using the C or C++ preprocessor, though the actual #include and #define macros would still be in Latin script.
Unfortunately, the C standard (Annex D of http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n1256.pdf) does not allow runes in identifier names, but it would work for characters explicitly mentioned in the standard and supported by one's C compiler.
For other languages, one should be able to use Ruby metaprogramming to make it possible to write Ruby using nothing but runes and punctuation. One would have to define runic methods to replace the functionality def, class, module, and related keywords, but tricks like instance_eval make that possible.
Given that a monkey with a typewriter could create the full works of Shakespeare with infinite time, could a monkey with a Perl interpreter create a valid Perl program that does your string processing in under 1 minute?
Fascinating but I would love to know how common christianity was in this area. I've always been more fascinated with the old norse religion than its runes.
Also my personal view has always been that the catholic church actively waged a holy war to convert the nordic heathens. That any bad press the vikings received was simply propaganda from the victors who wrote the history books.
>I would love to know how common christianity was in this area.
A hundred years ago it would be close to 100% christianity. The runes was simply a traditional way of writing. Norse mythology is of course a lot of fun but it's sad how little we know of it and it's traditions.
There's a great isolate of Manchu being spoken in Xinjiang, who are descendents of some kind of military outpost that was abandoned after a dynastic change back in China proper.
I know that it is not an authoritative source, but there was an episode of an Anthony Bourdain show which travelled to Mexico / MidWest kind of area where they spoke Spanish that was mostly unchanged since 400 years ago.
Runes are derived from Roman alphabet. 2000 years ago there was strong contact between Rome empire and 'German' tribes. Many nordict people worked in Rome army, latter they even occupied Sicily.
This article doesn't properly projekt the magik of runes for one or more of the following reasons:
1. Runes are like magik (see my site runesaremagik.tumbler.com)
2. Who cares? Elvish.
3. Who cares? Klingon.
4. Who cares? ... everybodycares.js. It'll make your life as a front-end full-stack developer engineer designer hacker a lot easier by using stuff you already know to make new stuff with runes.
5. Heresy happens when you aren't sufficiently vigilant. Check your corners. They're coming for us.
And local dialects are anything but unusual, they appear even in not so isolated regions of small european countries. Which is a lot less likely place for a local dialect to survive than northern Swedish forest is.