Re: [tied] Re: Ingvar and Ivar

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

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2001 1:44 AM

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

 

 

>> ... If it was originally *i:waz, what's the final <-h> doing in its Anglo-Saxon name (<ih>/<eoh>)?

> The reconstruction *i:waz means "yew, bow".  I thought the problem was that *i:hwaz doesn't mean anything?

 

My point is that it *could* mean something (being etymologically a relative of *ingwaz, whatever Ing's name meant to the early Germani), even if the original sense was lost and an association with the nearly homophonous "yew" word was formed. BTW, you left my question about OE <-h> unanswered.

 

 

 

> Because vowel length was not marked, *i:waz was *too* acrophonic for /iu/, or so I would claim the inventor(s) of the rune thought.  They were wrong, or rather, misunderstood, as it turned out.

> I would consider Gothic <ei> for /i:/ an accident, like <o[u]> for /u/ in Gothic, Cyrillic and Armenian.  The futhark was not based on Greek.

 

It wasn't, but in late Proto-Germanic there was no *ei/*i: contrast, and [e] was just a positional variant of /i/. Note that the Wulfilan Gothic script did not employ <ou> for /u:/, and its orthographic conventions did not consists in aping the Greeks, either. Now consider the ablaut series in Gothic: i: -- ai -- i, iu -- au -- u. Unlike long /u:/, long /i:/ behaved morphophonologically like a diphthong. The functional load of the i/i: distinction was much heavier than that of u/u: because of its role in the verb system. the inventors of any early Germanic alphabet might find it a good idea to have a separate character for long /i:/ (e.g. to distinguish present and preterite forms of numerous verbs), while a single representation of /u/ and /u:/ was functional enough. Of course they didn't need a symbol for a long /a:/, because they had no such vowel, while /e:, o:/ did not have short phonemic counterparts until rather late. As the vowel systems of the various Germanic languages evolved and their complexity increased, writers made necessary adjustment in their futharks. My proposal is that initially there were runes with the following values: /i/, /i:/, /u ~ u:/, /e:/, /o:/, /a/ -- a reasonable solution for Common Germanic.

 

 

 

> ... The diphthong <iu> ~ <eo> is rather peculiar to Germanic, and may well have been thought worthy of a symbol of its own.  It would have been my choice, if I had to choose just one.

 

This is pretty subjective, and at odds with typology. Simplex spellings for diphthongs are not what we normally see when a writing system is initially devised for a language. And why "just one"? Did anything restrict their freedom to have more symbols? Besides, <iu> may look "peculiar to Germanic" if you transcribe it in this way, but in fact its allophonic range included [eu], which is a rather common diphthong, cross-linguistically. Spellings like <iu> or <eu> are not only unproblematic -- they are actually the only Runic representations of diphthongal [iu ~ eu] that I've ever seen (Continental and Anglo-Saxon varieties included).

 

 

 

>> Why isn't the Old English value [e:@] < *iu?

> Because of the acrophony of course, same as with /a/ > /o/ for *ansuR.

 

Beg your pardon, Miguel, but I don't quite follow. As *ans- changed to o:s and *o:Til- to ö:Tel/e:Tel, the Anglo-Saxon rune-cutters invented new modifications of the old a-rune to write down back /a(:)/ (the <ac> rune) and /o(:)/ (the <os> rune), while keeping the old shape for front <ae(:)> and reserving the *o:Til- rune for <ö(:)>. The F-like rune was given a new name (<aesc>), thus saving acrophony. But Rune 13 was called <eoh/ih> while its phonetic value was [i:]/[x ~ C], while the diphthong "eo" had the invariable Runic representation <eu>. No repair is visible here, presumably because in the reformed Anglo-saxon system with its new spelling conventions the <eoh> rune was becoming superfluos anyway and there was an increasing tendency to use it for postvocalic <-h>, i.e. [x/C], in which case acrophony didn't matter. If the original value had been *iu (> OE e:o), I find it hard to believe that the English should have given it a new "anacrophonic" value that didn't match the name <eoh>.

 

 

>> ... *i:waR was taken to be acrophonic for /i(:)/ instead of /iu/, leading to the rarity and eventual disuse of <ï> itself, and the use of <iu> or <eu> to mark the diphthong.

 

"Taken to be"? or was it /i:/ to start with?

 

 

>> Both a three-bar H and EI are represented in the Negau Helmet inscription (HARIGASTITEIWAI...), a "Germanoid" text in a North Italic alphabet.

> Does <ei> really stand for <i:> here, or for /ei/?

 

Does it make a difference in Proto-Germanic?

 

 

> I still think it doesn't make any sense.  The futhark is otherwise an exact (niceties such as vowel length excluded) match for the old Germanic phonological system.  Whatever other (politico-religious) agenda the inventor(s) of the runes had, they sure knew their
phonology.  A rune for "sometimes /i/, sometimes /h/" has no place in the original concept (even if that's what we see attested several centuries later in Anglo-Saxon England).

 

Your faith in the phonological expertise of the inventor(s) is touching, but it's hard to expect that any real-life writing system should be perfect in all respects. We don't even know how faithfully our reconstructed "standard" futhark represents the original invention. If, as seems likely, the inspiration for the oldest futhark sprang from familiarity with some variety of the Nort Italic and/or Roman script, we should expect the "recycling" of letters that represented sounds alien to Germanic. Thus the M-like Etruscan <s'> was used for [e:], Etruscan or Roman <e>, if originally employed, was gradually discarded, since it was redundant in Germanic ([e] being in complementary distribution with [i]), but may have survived in the combination <ei> used for [i:].

 

Runes were often "bound" to save space, and a "bound" Etruscan or Venetic <ei> would have been graphically indistinguishable from the main variant of <h>. I doubt if the futhark was born all at once in its optimal shape -- a "Golden Age" form with later corruptions. More realistically, there would have been initial attempts to write Germanic (such as the Negau Helmet inscription), followed by experiments in which new letters were created or old ones manipulated in various ways in order to obtain new shapes when desirable. Runes 9 (<h>), 12 (<j>) and 13 (our mystery rune) may all easily derive from Etrusco-Venetic <h> via attempts to disambiguate its phonetic values by associating them with slightly modified shapes of the letter.

 

I can't offer a one-shot brilliant explanation of all the enigmas of the runic script. I'm merely trying to give a coherent form to an idea that occurred to me when Torsten mentioned the ing-/i:- alternation in Germanic. The idea is evolving now and will hopefully look better in a few days' time. I'll return to it soon.

 

Piotr