[gothic-l] Re: Old Gutnish

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Hi Tore!
You wrote:
>I found an interesting passage in "Runorna i Sverige" by Otto v. Friesen,
>one of the most famous rune specialists.
>
>In this book he analyzis the development of the rune alfabeths.
>
>He says that at the end of the 11th century they try in Denmark to build
>the "helstungna" alfabeth on the Danish runes. However in a consequent and
>original way we find this done in Gotland during the 12th century. The
>signs are naturally adapted to the strange Old Gutnish sound system where æ
>and ø-sounds are missing. This indicates that v. Frisen was of the opinion
>that Oldgutnish was very different from the other languages in Scandinavia.

Yes vowel systems are some of the things that can change quite fast.
I think I discovered this morning another rule that makes it easy to translate
back and forth between Old English and Old Norse. The rule is that ON "ei"
becomes long "a" in English. Examples that I thought of are Hygelac/Hugleik,
Wihstan/Vestein, but also gar/geir  ( a spear). Thus that particularly interesting
sort of Danes mentioned in Beowulf, the Gardenas, would in Old Norse correspond
to the "Geir-danir"  (=the Spear-Danes; who were they?).

That is just an example, but I think you quite often find such very exact rules
between related Germanic languages of how to carry the vowel system of one language 
over to the vowel system of another language by using very exact rules of correspondence.

Another example is how the Old Dutch long "i" (written "ij") became the diphtong "ei".
Thus when you see a Dutch word such as Rijn, mijn, fijn, zijn, you can be pretty sure 
it used to be a long "i" some centuries ago, but today it is invariably pronounced as the
diphtong. This just to illustrate that vowel changes can be quite systematic.
The thing is that I am not sure if I am willing to call such sytematic vowel
differences between two languages for any (real) difference at all. I would
say that such very systematic rules of correspondence, rather underline 
the similarity between the two languages, than express any real difference.

Best regards
Keth 



You are a member of the Gothic-L list.  To unsubscribe, send a blank email to <gothic-l-unsubscribe at egroups.com>. 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/