[HN Gopher] Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world's ol...
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Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world's oldest
Author : diodorus
Score : 123 points
Date : 2023-01-22 02:55 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| A very neat book on this topic (he was my professor for years
| much later than that book):
|
| A Concise Grammar of the Older Runic Inscriptions, by Elmer
| Antonsen 1975
|
| https://a.co/d/9nITdEY
| msrenee wrote:
| Neat! If anyone's looking to buy and dissuaded by the Amazon
| price, it looks like Abebooks has cheaper used copies.
| legulere wrote:
| I always wonder with runes if there is a huge survivorship bias.
| Runes most likely lack horizontal strokes to be easier to carve
| into wood, but wood doesn't endure time as much. Also with stones
| there's probably a similar effect: in central Europe stones like
| sandstone or limestone are more common. They are weathering
| faster than other stones.
| cal85 wrote:
| I'm confused as to what you're saying here, but it sounds
| interesting. Can you clarify? Survivorship bias of what over
| what?
| arminiusreturns wrote:
| It's well known in protohistory that most of the religious
| sites were wooded, both with idols and altars of wood, but
| also in the forest itself in special places such as groves.
| The romans destroyed most of it, and later the christians
| (but I repeat myself). So I think gp is just reiterating
| this.
|
| Here in America our high country and high country desert
| really make us lucky for having close to surface access of
| ancient things, makes archaeology and paleontology much
| easier.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I've loved runes ever since I saw them on JRR Tolkiens book as a
| little kid. Very very cool to see something this old.
|
| _"Not all inscriptions have a linguistic meaning," says Zilmer.
| "It's possible that someone has imitated, explored or played with
| the writing. Maybe someone was learning how to carve runes."_
|
| Yeah as I understand a lot of run carvings were more symbolic,
| loads of stuff where people just repeat a rune over and over
| because it represents a god, or how many times alu has been
| found.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Anybody looking for information not filtered through science
| journalism wouldn't go wrong checking out the Twitter threads of
| two of the researchers:
|
| https://twitter.com/KristerVasshus/status/161523653168960716...
|
| https://twitter.com/Kristel_Zilmer/status/161546218260654080...
|
| I also recommend Jackson Crawford's video on the subject as well:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_m2xcoU9Q0
|
| He also had an in-depth interview with Krister Vasshus on his
| Patreon which will probably be on his You-Tube channel
| eventually.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Any discussion that doesn't even mention the possibility of
| origin in semitic forms (which, of course, Greek and ultimately
| Roman also trace to) seems unlikely to enlighten.
|
| Carthaginians certainly got around. You would seem to need a
| plausible reason for them to have been unable or unwilling to
| visit Denmark.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| Just because they don't mention this not-widely-accepted
| hypothesis you're going to dismiss it? Ok.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| It doesn't offer anything else. So, yes. "Not widely
| accepted" means, exactly, "usefully checked against new
| evidence".
|
| If you can point to anything beyond "woohoo, new older
| runes" and "maybe this helps distinguish between Greek and
| italic origin", do.
| [deleted]
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| If you have any info on this, post it.
| eesmith wrote:
| I was also curious about the topic.
|
| I think this book review by Nelson Goering of Robert
| Mailhammer & Theo Vennemann's book "The Carthaginian North:
| Semitic Influence on Early Germanic: A Linguistic and
| Cultural Study" at https://hcommons.org/deposits/download/h
| c:40752/CONTENT/goer... and
| https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.20028.goe does a good job of
| summarizing the argument and the review author's issues
| with it.
|
| > The thesis presented in this book - that there was a
| substantial linguistic impact on what would become Proto-
| Germanic from the Punic spoken by Carthaginians who
| allegedly established outposts in northern Europe - has
| been argued by one of the authors in various articles for
| many years (see the collected articles in Vennemann 2003,
| 2013), and is already known as 'controversial'. ... This
| book can be taken as arguing the best possible case for
| Punic influence on Germanic ...
|
| > This, then, is the sum of the strictly linguistic
| evidence marshalled by MV for the alleged Punic contact and
| linguistic influence on Germanic. They supplement it with
| an appeal to writing systems, arguing that runes are best
| derived directly from the Punic alphabet. They make a
| number of points, but a large core of their argument turns
| on the supposed derivation of the first four runes (for f,
| u, th, and a), in order, shape, and sound, from the Punic
| alphabet. .
|
| > The result of this, it should by now be clear, is that I
| must conclude that the central thesis of the book - that
| there was linguistic influence from Punic on pre-Germanic -
| is not supported by the evidence marshalled here. More than
| that, I would say that this Punic hypothesis may now be
| confidently rejected as very probably untrue. If such
| influence were real, then the combined labours of two
| talented linguists, one working on the problem for very
| many years, and with ample (if often critical) feedback to
| build on, would have uncovered convincing traces by now.
| That they have not strongly suggests that such do not
| exist. If this is the best argument that can be made for
| the Punic hypothesis, then the hypothesis would appear to
| be incorrect.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| It would be interesting to explore whether this has any effect on
| the hypothesis, based purely on letterform comparisons, that
| runes may be traced to semitic symbols, presumably introduced by
| Carthaginian refugees or, anyway, travellers.
|
| (This idea has been dismissed as impossible based on the
| timeline, as the oldest runes postdate Carthage's demolition by
| centuries, but that argument depends on assuming we have a
| complete archaeological record, which we of course do not.)
|
| If the older letterforms more closely resemble a semitic form, it
| would be powerful evidence in favor. If not, things get more
| complicated.
| jvickers wrote:
| 1) Why Carthaginian rather than Phoenician?
|
| 2) Given that runes are a form that's optimised for writing on
| trees, it should not be expected that the oldest runes will be
| found.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Carthaginians were Phoenicians.
| sillyquiet wrote:
| > but that argument depends on assuming we have a complete
| archaeological record, which we of course do not.
|
| In other words that argument depends on _the available
| evidence_ rather than speculation, like, you know, how science
| should be done.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Assuming you already have all the possible evidence already
| leads to falsehoods. Science is about not embracing
| falsehoods, if it is anything.
|
| What you promote is what cemented "Clovis first" for decades
| beyond its sell-by date, and opposition to the K-T bolide
| model and plate tectonics. Pretending to know interferes with
| coming to know.
|
| For a more recent example:
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128.
| ..
|
| Opposition was sloppy to the point of dishonesty.
| kgeist wrote:
| Do you have links to the arguments in favor of the semitic
| hypothesis?
| moloch-hai wrote:
| https://theconversation.com/shillings-gods-and-runes-
| clues-i...
|
| might be a good place to start.
| kgeist wrote:
| Oh I heard about Theo Venneman, his conjectures weren't
| convincing to me. As far as I remember he tried to explain
| all Proto-Germanic words of unclear origin (unclear at the
| time) as stemming from Semitic but since then convincing
| derivations from Proto-Indoeuropean have been proposed for
| many of them, so his arguments are quite shaky.
| msrenee wrote:
| So that's a guy claiming he and another person figured out
| that the derivation of some Proto-Germanic words came from
| a semitic language. No published paper, just conjecture. He
| claims that there are a number of loanwords in Proto-
| Germanic that came from semitic. The word "loanword" is a
| link to what you would expect to lead to some evidence for
| it. Instead, it leads to a website listing a number of
| different loanwords from various languages. The closest
| thing on that list is Yiddish and it clearly states they
| mostly entered the language in the 20th century.
| peterfirefly wrote:
| Plenty of publications by Venneman (mentioned on the
| linked site). The man was a linguistics professor for 30
| years. Was he right? Probably not, but definitely not
| just "a guy" and "another person".
| Bayart wrote:
| Nordic runes have a blatant filiatiation to Italic scripts,
| especially the Etruscan alphabet. It's rather natural that it
| would spread from the Alps to the North Sea through the Rhine
| River. In that sense it's just as much descended from the
| Phoenician alphabet as the Latin alphabet is. But a _direct_
| descent from a Semitic script makes less sense. This being said
| there are cases of scripts being adopted from afar rather than
| from a neighbour. For example Transalpine Gaul used a Greek
| script before the Roman invasion, rather than an Italic one.
| moloch-hai wrote:
| Yet, we know it is more complicated than simple derivation
| from Etruscan. So the real question is what else happened.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Interesting, 1800-2000 years ago is right back in a time when
| it's somewhat harder to make a distinction between the various
| Germanic language families. Very close to a more common Germanic
| era, so if there's much written here it could tell us a lot about
| Germanic family language evolution.
|
| But it does sound like it's the usual "I, cmrdporcupine, wrote
| this rune" graffiti form :-) Not a lot of words
| JasonFruit wrote:
| This statement[0] from the University of Oslo, linked from the
| article, explains how the stone was dated, and is in general more
| explanatory.
|
| [0]: https://www.khm.uio.no/english/news/found-the-world-s-
| oldest...
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(page generated 2023-01-23 23:01 UTC)