Re: [tied] Re: Ingvar and Ivar

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

From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Sunday, February 18, 2001 10:33 PM

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

>> ... 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.

> I think that's too archaic a stage: as far as I can tell, the <e> and <o> runes in even the oldest known inscriptions are used for short <e> and <o> as well as long ("ek hlewagastiR holtijaR horna tawido", n'est-ce pas?).  The vowel system at the time the futhark was invented would rather have been /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /a:/ (?), /e:/ (?),
/i:/, /o:/, /u:/, /ai/, /au/, /iu/, /eo/.

 

The Galehus horn is a few centuries younger than the oldest known inscriptions. The really oldest ones are frustratingly fragmentary and hard to interpret. It's rather difficult, given the limited evidence, to speculate on the relative chronology of runic origins and the phonemicisation of short /e/ and /o/ (which belongs to the history of individual dialects rather than PGmc).

 

>> Did anything restrict their freedom to have more symbols?

> Certainly: the aettir.  They had to have 3 x 8 symbols.

 

Speaking with tongue in cheek? Or do you really believe that the inventors first determined the number of runes that the futhark "had to have" and only then began to invent them? 24 runes divided into three "aettir" is the canonical Older Futhark arrangement in Scandinavia, but Frisian and Anglo-Saxon runecutters obviously ignored numerological considerations as they added new runes (there are 28 in the Thames Scramasax futhorc); the users of the Younger Futhark did not hesitate to slim it down to 16 runes.

> What's the story on this helmet (where?, when?), I don't recall...

The Negau Helmet was found in 1811 in Styria among 25 other North Italian style helmets such as were worn by mercenaries. Some date it at ca. 300 BC, but I've been told that it's more reliably dated to 175-50 BC. The inscription on the helmet (HARIGASTITEIVAI[IVT...?]) is in a North Italian alphabet virtually identical with that used for Venetic. It reads right to left and was regarded as "Etruscan" until 1925, when the legible part was deciphered as Harigasti Teiwai (Ti:wai?), variously interpreted but apparently containing a well-known Germanic name plus the dative of "Tiw".

> One objection (I'm agnostic on <M> /s'/ -> /e/): it is my understanding that the oldest Anglo-Saxon and Frisian runes have a H with just one horizontal stroke.  The forms with two, or three, strokes are later.

I think this is only true of the Caistor-by-Norwich inscription on a roe-deer astragalus(<raIhan>, I = Rune 13). It is dated to the fifth century (R.I. Page says "ca. 400"), possibly before the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain, and may have been left by a mercenary from the North Germanic area.

 

Piotr