Re: [tied] Germanic in the east?

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 28758
Date: 2003-12-25

24-12-03 06:25, Michael Smith wrote:

> Hi, someone posted this on another group, and I want to know what you
> all think:
>
> "Incidentally see:
> http://home.earthlink.net/~ekerilaz/princess.html
> Early Germanic Runes in Central Asia
> On the web-site below there is a picture of a runic inscription from
> Kazakstan from a Scythian grave and dating from around 400-300 BCE .
> It is
> apparently in a Germanic tongue.
> The site itself is a bit "New-Worldish" but the source quoted for the
> inscription is Renate Rolle who is a respected scholar."

The owner of the site says, among other things:

"When I first saw a sketch of this inscription, I recognized all the
characters immediately as having identical forms with Germanic runes. In
fact, I tentatively read part of the inscription as UUilaz or Wilaz,
possibly an Indo-Iranian version of Wilagaz, or in modern English, Wily
(see my last article for the possibly homosexual connotations of this
name)."

I can't support this "decipherment", the opinion that "all the
characters" in question are identical with Germanic runes, or the
ramblings about transvestite Saka priest(esse)s teaching the Heruli the
art of writing. Renate Rolle is the source for the inscription, but not
for any of the opinions based on it. Anyway, what would a Germanic name
(showing the effects of Verner's Law!) have been doing among the Saka in
the 4th c. BC, if (according to the same speculator) the borrowing of
this form of writing by the Germani took place several centuries later?
It just fails to make any sense at all.

It's obvious to anyone who's seen the relevant data that the futhark was
rather closely modelled on one of the North Italic alphabets with a
Graeco-Etruscan pedigree (the prime suspect being Venetic, with, I'd
suggest, traces of Latin influence), even if the process of transmission
is not quite clear to us yet. Some scripts derived from Greek alphabets
(e.g. the one used for Lycian) are much older than the runes but could
easily be mistaken for them by a layman. If the marks on the dish are
really in "runic Sakan", it might be an Iranian writing system inspired
by a Greek or Greek-derived script.

Piotr