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This post makes far bigger deal of (somewhat) recent rune usage than it actually is in my opinion. It's not like this folk used hieroglyphic alphabet when the r
by krick 11y ago
This post makes far bigger deal of (somewhat) recent rune usage than it actually is in my opinion. It's not like this folk used hieroglyphic alphabet when the rest of the country used latin letters. Runes are basically the same thing as latin/cyrillic letters. Just one more phonetic alphabet with different shape of the letters. Well, and it's old. Nothing special about that, really. In fact, it could be more surprising that all germanic languages adopted latin alphabet so easily. Yeah, there's pretty clear explanation why this happened, but it could have happened the other way as well.
And local dialects are anything but unusual, they appear even in not so isolated regions of small european countries. Which is a lot less likely place for a local dialect to survive than northern Swedish forest is.
- kryptiskt 11y agoIt's pretty funny that people were using runes 300 years after the first generation of antiquity freaks among the upper classes painstakingly learned them so they could decipher the old stones. > And local dialects are anything but unusual, they appear even in not so isolated regions of small european countries. The point is that it isn't a dialect, it's accepted by linguists as a separate language. Even though the Swedish government refuses to accept that, though in less painful ways than when they tried to beat it out of the schoolkids (which they did until the fifties).
- davidw 11y ago> The point is that it isn't a dialect, it's accepted by linguists as a separate language. The trite phrase with some truth behind it that's often written in these discussions: "a language is a dialect with an army".
- singulaire 11y ago"and a navy." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
- bane 11y agoI think a couple things are important to consider here: - Though it's just another alphabet, it was independently invented. This is pretty cool. Alphabets (and related Abjads) have only ever been invented historically very few times and t hey tend to be variations on a few earlier systems. It's not at all obvious that this is a way to encode sounds and many more cultures use syllabaries or abugida (2 of the three native Japanese systems) or some kind of logograph system (like Chinese). Even Tsalagi ended up turning Latin characters into a syllabary. - Runes look like they're uniquely useful for scratching into wood, just like various scripts in Mesopotamia (like Ugaritic or Akkadian) work best when pressed into wet clay with a stylus and Arabic, Chinese and Korean work best written with a brush. It's interesting how different systems have kind of an optimal medium to work in.
- pjlegato 11y agoRunes weren't independently invented. They were likely derived from Old Italic alphabets related to Latin. This is why many of the runic characters are graphically similar to their Latin equivalents. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark#Origins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elder_Futhark#Origins * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Italic_script
- bane 11y agoIt's unclear how much influence Old Italic alphabets had on the various Runics though it's generally thought that Etruscan was a shared ancestor. There's some theories that some of the similarities are the result of co-evolution or repurposing of found letter a la Tsalagi. For example, Danish Futhark uses the character for 'm' that's used as 'ph' in Etruscan (later to become greek 'phi'), obviously not a morphological change but a repurposing. Another example, Etruscan 'sh' seems to have disappeared due to confusion with a simplified 'M', which is similar to 'e' in Elder Futhark and 'i' in Gothenburg Runes. These may have simply been "loan" glyphs, adopted to fill some phonological need, in the way that English doesn't have letters for 'sh', 'ch' or 'zh'. Most of the morphology seems wholly unique in early Runic scripts, hinting at their uniqueness. But again, as Sequoyah demonstrated, loan characters often are used in more "obvious" ways like as a syllabary. There's later forms of Runes that borrow more heavily from Latin scripts, and these also seem to be more regularized and simplified over the less standard earlier scripts.
- davidw 11y ago> And local dialects are anything but unusual, they appear even in not so isolated regions of small european countries. Which is a lot less likely place for a local dialect to survive than northern Swedish forest is. I was always amazed by the linguistic diversity in Italy, much of which is anything but isolated. Even in the plains of the Veneto, you can ride a bike far enough for the locals to tell that you're from a different area (without even looking at what's written on your jersey!).
- gioele 11y agoIn bigger cities like Rome it is not hard to tell which suburb you are from or you have spent your childhood in from your accent and choice of words. But then, isn't it the same with English in England? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhninL_G3Fg
- netcan 11y agoLess and less.
- vidarh 11y agoI live in London, and you can tell South/East/North/West London apart with relatively little practice. On top of that there are several distinct dialects in the surrounding areas (1-2 hours travel out of inner London), as well as a few different sociolects (dialects spoken by distinct socio-economic groups more than separated by area).
- semi-extrinsic 11y agoIn Norway, a 2h ferryboat trip can take you from a city where people speak fairly mainstream Norwegian to an island where the locals cannot be understood by most Norwegians (unless the locals make an effort and speak mainstream).
- k8tte 11y agoand 4 hour by car takes you to älvdalen ;-) https://www.google.se/maps/dir/Oslo,+Norge/%C3%84lvdalen/@60.2048426,11.3549992,6.59z/data=!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x46416e61f267f039:0x7e92605fd3231e9a!2m2!1d10.7522454!2d59.9138688!1m5!1m1!1s0x466864c7e6cec4f5:0x4fdcbaf0d2d5c92d!2m2!1d14.0419871!2d61.227306 https://www.google.se/maps/dir/Oslo,+Norge/%C3%84lvdalen/@60...
- pjmlp 11y ago> And local dialects are anything but unusual, they appear even in not so isolated regions of small european countries. Which is a lot less likely place for a local dialect to survive than northern Swedish forest is. For example, Mirandês in northern Portugal. It looks like this, http://frolesmirandesas.blogspot.de/ http://frolesmirandesas.blogspot.de/
- mseebach 11y agoThe letter Þ (Thorn) is in modern use in Icelandic, and directly derived from the runic alphabet. Icelandic, by virtue of having been near completely isolated for hundreds of years, is also the modern language most closely related to old norse, in much the same way American english is closer to the english of the enlightenment than modern British english is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)