I'm not entirely clear: are you saying that in my retelling of Liberman's lecture that he meant that the runes were not understood for their phonetic value?  If so, I did not mean to convey that.  I don't remember Liberman remarking, nor concluded from what I heard, that they did not understand the phonetic values of the runes, just that they were not bound to how we would use them (purely for the phonetic value and nothing else).

"...a magical symbol also incorporating names"

I'm a little confused here as well.  Are you referring to the names of the runes ('ur', etc.?)  As I remember from the lecture, Liberman mentioned that the names used for the runes ('ur', etc.) are only documentable until post-Viking Age usage, and so he could not remark upon them or conclude when the names were developed.  He also mentioned that it's difficult to deduce when runes began to be used for magic, since the only documents that allude to this were produced in the 13th c. (the sagas) about 1100 or 1200 years after they were first created.  It could be that the magical use for the runes did not develop for some time.


~Eyja

On Wed, Apr 8, 2009 at 8:15 PM, <asvardhrafn@ yahoo.ca> wrote:

I would disagree with the esteemed professor in that the futhark's well developed use as a magical symbol also incorporating names that use the sounds that he believe that the so called primitive Germanics only later fully understood the use of. I don't dispute thay they likely aquired the idea of writting from some one else. I would more likely point to western use of Chinese pictograms for their symbology rather than for their use in the construction of comound words. I fully understand the pictogram mwen (door) has linguistic uses like being the basis for the word lightning but would be more likely paint it by my door if I was into Taoism as a nod to the guardian spirits without needing to comprehend its full usage.

Asvard

Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network

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From: Eyja Bassadottir
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2009 19:42:18 -0500
To: <norse_course@ yahoogroups. com>
Subject: Re: [norse_course] Re: futhark

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 8:52 PM, llama_nom <600cell@.... co.uk> wrote:

The younger futhark (Viking Age runes) is an ambiguous writing system in many ways. Not only is vowel quantity (length) not marked, but vowels of several different qualities could be written with the same letter. In some systems, voiced stops weren't distinguished from voiceless stops. How will someone know if they're saying the word correctly? Often they won't know! In the era when the inscriptions were made, when people spoke the language, they'd know they were pronouncing a word right if they guessed rightly which word was intended, just as someone reading Arabic or Hebrew has to supply the vowels from their own knowledge. But there would still have been ambiguities. Although there are vowels in the futhark, there was no one fixed convention for how to spell words. Nowadays, we have to guess as best we can at what the writers meant.

.

Another thing that makes it ambiguous is that scholars still debate on which way the runes were read/written.  Depending on the orientation, you might get different meanings (especially with the ambiguity of the letters). 


I recently listened to a lecture by Professor Anatoly Liberman on the runes ("One More Hopeless Attempt to Explain the Origin of the Runic Alphabet").  One of his points was that when runes appear (first inscription was around 1st or 2nd century CE -- I wrote down 1st in my notes but his handout said 2nd) -- and afterwards as they were used, the inscriptions were short and extremely uninteresting, and of course change depending on which way you read them.  There's even a spear that repeats the same rune over and over again (I believe 'ur') or some items even have the entire FUTHARK written out.  To our modern minds, this seems odd -- we use writing to produce sensical communication through sentences.  But Liberman made two points:

1) that he believed that the runes were not used for their original purpose (i.e. used for magic (at least by the 13th c. when the sagas were written) but not made for that purpose) (ex. give a math textbook to a three year old and he'll devise several good uses for it -- a stepping stool, for instance -- but he doesn't use it for it's original purpose) [and thus not used for that sensical sentence construction we use it for],

2) that if you look at all alphabets, a single letter is never wanted -- it's the sequence that's important ('v' just being a 'v', but 'vvvvvvvvvvvv' being a sequence and thus important, or even just the entire alphabet (in this case rune-set) produced) [and since the Scandinavians were not using the runes for our purpose, such a rune repeated would make sense to them, for whatever purpose they meant it for]

In his thought process, the Scandinavians thought the runes were quaint and strange playthings, but coming from an entirely oral culture, not necessary (and thus playthings). 

All of his theories are unprovable (as he said, the truth is probably lost to time -- if the truth was discoverable, it would have been found 200 years ago) -- the pitfall of etymology -- and is rife with landminds, (hence the title of his lecture).  He just believes, as any etymologist does, that his theory is the least wrong.


Holliga,
Eyja