Re: [tied] Re: Ingvar and Ivar

----- Original Message -----

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2001 4:48 PM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Ingvar and Ivar

> *ingwaR is Wolfgang Krause's reconstruction for the name.  If you have a better proposal...

 

No, I haven't got one, and I don't mind *ingWaz as a rune-name. I only pointed out that it's a reconstruction.

> But we also have additional evidence:

> 1) the name of the 13th rune is usually reconstructed as *i:waR

 

What kind of "evidence" is this? The name is also commonly reconstructed as *i:xWaz, and with good reason. If it was originally *i:waz, what's the final <-h> doing in its Anglo-Saxon name (<ih>/<eoh>)?

> 2) the names of the runes (except, obviously, *ingwaR for /N/ and *algiR for /R/) are acrophonic.

 

If Rune 13 stood for long /i:/, its name WAS acrophonic. If it stood for dorsal (velar/palatal) fricatives as opposed to word-initial lenited [h], its name can't have been acrophonic for the same reason that ruled out acrophony for /N/ and /z/ -- segments that did not occur word-initially. But *i:waz (let alone *i:hWaz) would hardly have been acrophonic for /iu/ in Proto-Germanic or Proto-NW-Germanic terms.

 
> 3) Vowel length was not distinguished.

 

Nor was it in Gothic, EXCEPT for i/i:, as you noted yourself.

 

> 4) Last but not least: the inventor(s) of the runes knew what they were doing.

 

So what? How does it follow from (4) that the phonetic value of Rune 13 was [iu]? If the inventors bothered to write [iu] with a single rune, why didn't they do the same for [au] and [ai], just in order to be consistent? Why isn't the Old English value [e:@] < *iu? Finally, why are reflexes of *iu spelt <iu> or <eu> in extant Early Runic and Old English inscriptions although Rune 13 is preserved in the futharks in question?

 

> The above can only lead to one conclusion: the 13th rune originally stood for /iu/ when the runes were first invented (either in Denmark or in the neighbourhood of the Roman limes, around the beginning of our era).  Unfortunately, the origins of the runic script are still obscure and very few early runic inscriptions are known, so we may
never know for sure.

The conclusion is a non-sequitur. But suppose the runic script was inspired by an Etruscan or Venetic prototype in which the combination of E and I looked exactly like H (the variant with three crossbars) -- this similarity might have led to the orthographic identification of EI [i:] and H [h/x]. Both a three-bar H and EI are represented in the Negau Helmet inscription (HARIGASTITEIWAI...), a "Germanoid" text in a North Italic alphabet. Note that both Rune 9 (*hagalaz, especially its Anglo-Frisian variant) and Rune 13 resemble varieties of Venetic H, and that those which could serve as prototypes of Rune 13 (a vertical staff flanked by two shorter lines or dots) are confusible with Venetic <.I.>. One could think of various reasons why this particular rune should have had more than one phonetic value.

 

Piotr