Old Norse vs. Proto-Norse (Elder Futhark Language)
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- Опубліковано 29 вер 2020
- So Elder Futhark went out of use before the Viking Age, when Old Norse was spoken... but what was the language like back when Elder Futhark was in use? Includes a translation of Hávamál stanza 77 into Proto-Norse to demonstrate how different the earlier and later language stages are.
Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus. Visit jacksonwcrawford.com/ (includes bio and linked list of all videos).
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In reconstructing a Proto-Norse form of the title Hávamál, I ought to have added the plural ending which still would have been distinct at the time, something like *Haihwanmaþlu (not just *-maþl).
Nice to see that you're even correcting older videos to make sure people are not being misinformed. I bet it's because you're making a full Proto-Norse Hávamál. If that's true then I am truly hyped!
I absolutely love being told ancient European history by a cowboy standing in front of the Rocky mountains! One world ... one history!
cowboys of the wild west were pretty much land vikings were they not?
You sound like thats outlandish even though hes of european descent
Yep, things can get a shy-bit strange.
I am a hillbilly hog farmer that just happens to teach Archeology & Ancient History in college.
Never know what you might run into.
The stanza from Hávamál in proto-Norse was really cool.
Would it be possible to do a similar comparison with Proto-Germanic and either Proto-Norse or Old Norse?
Proto-germanic and proto-norse is quite similar though.
And, from what I'm reading, it seems the term "Proto-Germanic" can cover a fairly long period of time, like a millennium, and thus, really doesn't describe a more-or-less static language (as if any language remains static). Still, the evolution from PIE through these various stages (and not only in the Germanic branch, but all of them) to the plethora of IE languages now spoken, is fascinating.
The forms Jackson brings up here are pretty much Proto-Germanic.
And east vs west ON!
Compare these; Proto-Germanic "Ek hléwagastiz holtijaz horna tawidǭ", Proto-Norse: "Ek hléwagastiR holtijaR horna tawidō". Old norse; "Ek Hlégestr hyltir táða horn" Icelandic; " Eg Hlégestur hyltir táða horn Swedish; "Jag, Lägäst Holte, gjorde hornet" Norwegian; "Jeg/Eg légjest holte, lagde hornet."
Interesting, being a Latvian language speaker, I clearly see striking similarities in grammar between modern Latvian (which is a Baltic family language, also one of the most archaic Indo-European languages) and Proto-Norse. Obviously, Scandinavians had a great influence on the Baltic tribes and had a huge settlement (Birka size) in Vendel period in modern day Latvia territory, near Grobina, but still, the semilarity is striking. Btw, to speak, in Latvian is - runāt :)
Latvian is a very conservative language. So it is possible that the grammar is shared all the way back to common roots in PIE, but is retained in latvian but not nordic languages.
If you go further back to pre-proto-Germanic, i.e. reverse the Germanic consonant shifts, the similarity to Baltic is striking....
Proto norse looks so much more similar to gothic to me. Would love to see a comparison between gothic, old gutnish and proto norse.
I would like to know more about Proto-Germanic,and how it may have been possible that it had a non Indo-European substrate. Good vid,I'm glad I became a Patreon subscriber.
Proto-Norse is really hard to come across, thanks, Dr Crawford!
Really enjoyed this exercise-- glad you chose 77 for the comparison & the backdrop is perfect. Thanks so much!
Thank you so much! This kind of info is so difficult to find! So much appreciation for the effort and time you put in these videos! Thank you 😊
Soooooo cool to see the side by side texts of Havamal!!!
Incredibly informative. Your explanations sound like fascinating poetry to me.
Awesom video professor. You translated my favorite verse there. I might turn it into a t-shirt! :D
Spaniard here. I love the comparative-historical linguistics. I’m learning Icelandic in orden to introduce myself in the Old Norse universe and to able to understand the evolution of the Scandinavian languages (I’ve learned Norwegian and Swedish). Thank you very much for your good job! 👍🏼
Serendipitous indeed! I've always wondered about the Elder Futhark! Never thought it would become a video though :D Thanks Dr Crawford!
Great video. Super interesting, thanks for your work.
Thank you for this! It is sometimes easy to forget that the process of change that languages goes through is still ongoing. For example, Swedish used to differentiate between singular and plural verbs as recently as about 100 years ago.
Danish too. It is funny how these two languages have evolved in parallel.
*As recently as 70 years ago, there are world war two documents using plural forms. However today nobody uses these at all, not even for poetry or trying to sound formal. Instead everything should be as informal as possible, written with slang terms and "everyday" speech. I'm not sure who benefits from this simplification.
Not in the spoken language though, where it started to go out of fashion already in the 1700s
@@germanicgems Because no one talks like how the language is written.
Jag skulle inte säga "Jag köpte mig en korv med bröd" och uttala alla bokstäver. Jag skulle säga "jä köpt mig en korv mä brö."
Sounds like a Bell 407 flew over you near the end :P
Thank you for your work that is enlightening me in my understanding of my paternal ancestors.
Thank you and for the great views, good vibes!😌
As always with old grammar stuff, you will find some really old people in my hometown in Dalarna, Sweden, who have preserved some of that grammar. Like plural verb endings -um, -i, -a, that you find in some villages. Sadly disappearing rapidly these days...
Hi Henrik. Its the same here in Denmark. People from jutland, still use the same old words 👍
That’s interesting, in the English town I am from we still use “thee” for the second person pronoun, it’s more common in older speakers but I myself will still use it sometimes. I think “is thee?” Sounds naturally warmer and friendlier than “are you?”, and I like the sound of “me and thee” more than “me and you”. It’s interesting to hear that in Sweden and Denmark this happens too, with older forms being preserved in more obscure areas
@@krisinsaigon Which part of England is that?
The Harbinger a town called Shaw in the edge of a town called Oldham next to Manchester
@@krisinsaigon thank thee
Excellent video.
Need a video on your thoughts on the Eruli/Herules/Erilaz ppl if you have any.
Two questions: Is "ne aldraigin" a double negative? Also, "Haiwanamaþl", does it have the same ambiguity? Did you have to choose between "high" and "one eye"? If so, which was it?
afaik, and I might be wrong, old norse just like other indo-european languages employed what's called "negative concords" so a double negative as found in most varieties of English today wouldn't be possible
Can you do a video on medieval runes pls ? :)
Random thoughts on this:
1. Modern Swedish kind of has this issue as well: We lack letters for several basic sounds in the language.
Skidskola has only one s and one k sound. The first sk- isn't said with those sounds at all.
2. If we combined the elder and younger futharks (i.e. fill in one with runes from the other if they signify sounds not in the first one), how many runes would we get? And how close to useful for writing modern Scandinavian languages would it be?
Mr Crawford could you please make a video that compares Proto-Norse to Old English?
dømi, steinum ...
what about unstressed vowel assimilated to consonant (labial m > labial u before it; palatal j > palatal i "after" it while it disappears)?
ProtoNorse warAit as in carved, must actually be the ancestor of rita(modern Swedish) meaning to draw.
Correct, the old norse speaking people just started using that word for drawing instead of writing.
It is also rather "wrAit" instead of "warAit", the parenthesis (a) is actually something called a "insticksvokal" (IIRC) in Swedish. The most likely theory is that since there were no rules for spelling, each rune carver had to spell out each word the way he thought it sounded. So the (a) is basically just the carver exaggerating the sound of the word pronounced slowly and thinking he or she heard an extra "a" sound between the "w" and the "r". It's not "wrong" or "misspelled" per se, it's just not how modern litterate people would have written it if we were to write that proto-norse word.
Yes, and rita also lives on in modern Nynorsk where it mainly means to write, but also can mean to draw or sketch something, or even is a synonym for another verb, å rissa, meaning to mark or draw something using a sharp tool (knife in wood, hard tool on metal, etc.).
@@jockeberg4089 Why would it be "instead of"? Isn't it more likely a matter of losing the more general meaning? (Maybe because a loanword replaced it - skriva from latin scribere?) Even today, when writing, one draws the shape of the letters. (this is also true of computer-based writing; the act of writing using a keyboard we call typing, and the mapping of the letters (encoded as numbers) to a visual image - using some font - is often called drawing by programmers.(The drawing is then rastered or rendered into pixels, which can then be displayed on a screen, or sent to a printer to be printed onto paper.) So drawing and writing can be seen as "the same", at least to some extent?
19:41 Is the younger futhark use of a separate rune for end-of-word “R” an archaic feature already in the 800s, or was there still an audible difference between the sounds written with the “r” and the “R” runes? 🤔
Did the dual exist in Proto-Norse?
in the transcription of "dómr um dauðan hvern" um is written as "ub", is this because of its root as "umbi" and the the fact that m is not written before b, like n before t?
Can u do a case study of the Elfdaian language, and how it relates to modern Scandinavian languages or Old Norse?
I know that mountain range I grew up just on the other side of them in Idaho
This is very interesting, thanks for this. I have a question. When you show the table of noun cases comparing Proto-Norse, Old Norse and Modern Swedish, I see the modern form has lost most cases but kept the final ‘s’ for the genitive.
I presume the genitive means something like “of the stone.” Is there any link between this genitive with an -s and the English form of an ‘s for possession? As they seem to have similar functions and are related languages
Yes there is! Also Greek -ος as in πατρος and Latin -is as in patris (both father's). The apostrophe represents a vowel which dropped out sometime during the Middle English period.
Pierre Abbat fascinating, I had never until now realized that was a relic of an older genitive form, though I knew old English bad noun cases
I’m just trying to learn Latin now now so I am just learning about noun cases
@@krisinsaigon yup modern English still has the genitive, represented by the ‘s. They don’t teach you that in English class growing up but that’s what it is.
@@pierreabbat6157 Was there really a dropped vowel where the apostrophe before the genitive s is in English? After all, the -s genitive (no apostophe) is ubiquitous in all germanic languages. Wasn’t the apostrophe in the orthography of the English genitive introduced with the printing press, a long time after any such supposed vowel already dropped?🤔 I’ve heard it was introduced by printers as sort of a misunderstanding that the -s was short for something like “his” in the phrase “the kinge his men”, as a group of actors were called.😊
I gotta say Jackson, I don't think that þ and ð could be considered allophones in (most varieties) of modern english. If you say þen or ðin (as opposed to ðen and þin) you'd get a *lot* of weird looks and requests for clarification. On the other hand, we certainly have a lot of vowel allophony, for instance at least three renderings of the word "been", compare the vowel phoneme which is the same between "bag" and "back" yet (in GA at least) with considerably different phonetic realizations, or indeed our production of palatal fricatives for the modern /hj/ phoneme cluster. All of those are fine examples of allophony in modern (GA) english. Love your channel
In modern swedish, saying plural genitive "stenars", the ending "rs" is mostly pronounced like "sh" = stenash.
In the west of Norway we dont really pronounce "stein" like stein anymore, we pronounce it more like stæin or stain, this is the same for many words that contain "ei"
I was born & raised in SW Oklahoma.
When in Jr & Sr High we were told that the Heavner Stone was a chiseled script
of some old Indian.
That made no sense, at all.
When in college, it was said to be Phoenician.
That made no sense either.
Many years later, I drove upon that mountain to check it out face to face.
Difficulty, I could make out some sense of it, using cuneiform. My doctoral studies were in Archeology and Ancient History centered in the Fertile Crescent. But it made no sense at all, real confusion.
I spoke later with the Park Ranger in charge. I translated, with difficulties, as "This Valley belongs to Gomi." He said that it was correct, yet scripted in Proto-Norwegian.
For the years since, I have studied the Norwegians and their activities in the central portion of the now, US.
I want to start learning a new language. I was hoping to find the one closest to old norse which I thought was Norwegian. But it seems that it's Swedish?
If that's true then my 20 minutes of Googling has failed me.
Thanks for the work you do. This video is way over my head right now. But I'm glad content like this is available.
I think it's Icelandic of Faroese
About umlauts, the way I've explained it to keep it fun was: the Germanic peoples were chronic drunkards, and had too much trouble pronouncing vowels that were too dissimilar, so they slurred their way into an easier front-of-mouth pronunciation. Probably not scientifically accurate, but I find it's memorable.
Sounds quite canon
That's how I explain French coming from Latin
And now I know what it would be like trying to have a conversation with Tolkien.
I much rather have Proto-Norse, than Old Norse. But my best choice would be Proto-Indo-European, with most word roots to be found in Germanic, Italic, Baltic, Slavic and Iranian tongues.
Thank you for the sweet comparison!
I was wondering, do we know when people in Northern Europe started speaking the Germanic languages?
How much knowledge do we have of the language that came before it?
cool thank you for the free lesson
I notice also, you reconstruct "daujith selbhaz samo" and not "daujiz selbhaz samo".
Why not second person, as in the Swedish translation, "sjelf dör ock du"?
(13:17) - ormr vs. worM
Woah, there's a lot of information to digest. Hearing you compare Proto- to Old- Norse in English while hearing words I mostly understand in Norwegian. Switching languages back and forth in my head in quick succession all while trying to also understand the information given is hard. How you can do this while speaking without tripping up is beyond me.
When I was in high school I got into this stuff and learned the Anglo Saxon futhorc runes to write in English. It mostly worked, of course. But it's still not a perfect fit for modern English IIRC
myself and my mates would use Futhorc runes that way also in grade school to plot afterschool adventures and confuse any would be note interceptors... we used boustrophedon ( we just knew we had pioneered this form of writing ....BRILLIANT WE WERE !!! LOL) to further thwart those who might stumble upon our post study plots to wage war on the neighborhood trees with swords of wood and trebuchets that eventually got my backside tanned fairly well once my grandmother found her sheets missing along with garden hose and assorted items ... and no Orphan Annie decoder ring needed !
16:33 Are you pronouncing the „ß“ in the transliteration as a “V” or some kind of “spanish/greek” mixture of “B” and “V”? Is that how that character is used in standard transliterations? I notice the same rune is a “clean” “B” in the last line. 🤔
PS. I also found it interesting that the second to last sound in the reconstructed name of Havamal in Proto-Norse is an unvoiced “th”, even though it is surrounded by two voiced sounds. Why is that? 😏
That's β, a Greek letter, not eszet (a German letter)
@@F_A_F123 Look at the typography. It is clearly NOT a beta. 🤷
In Flemish/Dutch, the plural of steen is stenen [stehnuhn], much like the PN acc. pl. stainan.
Why use the eszett (ß) which stands for a double s, for a b in selbaz?
I wondered that too, I listened to that part a few time to make sure I hadn't misheard the pronunciation. It doesn't look like he's reading off of anything when reciting the proto-norse version so I'm assuming it was just a mistake to put the eszett in when annotating the video.
It's a β (Beta)
In the Swedish Gotland dialect some words still sound more like Old Norse. Notably "sten" and other "e" words.
I know this is very close to speculation but what would you say that the turning point date would be concerning z => r? Migration era? Vendel era?
So which language would the Norse Germanic gods of spoken? Old Norse or Proto-Norse or even Proto-Germanic?
Wow its so cool that as a swede i can understand some of the proto-norse words
YES!!
Could you do some videos about the Vendel Age? Is this age still using proto-norse? It would seem so. Are there any texts or literature from this age or was it all still oral tradition? When do you estimate the Norse religion first began to be formed?
Edit: Proto-Norse is even more impressive than old-Norse. Elder Futhark is more complex and, strangely, Proto-Norse appears to have some characteristics that are closer to Latin. What are your thoughts about this?
There are a very small number of runestones in Proto Norse. (8-10 depending how you are counting stones using a transitional language). Also short inscriptions on archeological finds like jewelry and tools. Very short texts only, ranging from single words to a couple of sentences. (Not exactly literature.)
The Norse religion probably just a slight variant of similar religions in the other Germanic areas of Europe, and more distantly related to the Greek and Roman religions. It is possible that there were a common European or Indo-European religion that spread and mutated (more or less along with the languages).
It is not strange that Proto-Norse is closer to Latin, when we know both languages have developed from the same language, Proto-Indo-European.
Proto-Indo-European were discovered exactly because scholars who knew old European languages like Latin and Old Greek, learned Indian languages (including Sanskrit) and found that these languages had increasing similarities in the older versions of the languages.
They definetly would have been speaking Proto-Norse in the earlier portion of the Vendel Age. By the end of the Vendel Age, ie around 700, the language was most of the way to Old Norse but not quite. Archeological evidence does support perhaps some temples, but the religion was most likely constructed through oral tradition, given that most runic inscriptions are very brief and often difficult to decipher because of lost context.
@@GormHornbori Thanks for commenting. I was always intrigued by the Vendel age because it seemed to be more sophisticated than the Viking age. The helmets and other art forms are very impressive, maybe even superior to what came afterwards but, at least from the videos that i have seen, Dr. Crawford never really spoke about it.
With this video about Proto-Norse, my personal impression that this older mysterious age was more complex and fascinating seems to be linguistically confirmed. I wonder if ship building and all the naval advances that led to the "Drakkars" was already beginning.
@@bobjoe7508 I must confess that i didn't even know that before old Norse there was another previous Scandinavian language. I thought it was Proto-Germanic that was the immediate ancestor of old Norse, not an even more beautiful and complex language like this one. The remotest past of all cultures reveals itself to be, perhaps, the most authentic. I wish there was more videos about this language and also about the development of its contemporary art and technology, leading all the way to the Viking age.
Pedro Cacela Proto Norse and Proto Germanic are very close, because Proto Norse is one of the main sources for PGer phonology, along with Gothic.
Around when did the rs in swedish become a 'sh' sound?
I'd say about 50-100 years ago depending on the accent
In theory the sounds spelled "rs" and "sh" in modern Swedish are actually different sounds, but in my (Swedish but layman) experience it seems like a relatively recent development to pronounce them basically the same (if you pronounce the rs sound "properly" you sound like an old lady). So depending on what you mean, the answer could be as late as within the last few generations. But I think what you're actually asking is when the rs changed from being two separate sounds to just one sound. That, I don't know the answer to.
Would you say finland swedish maintains older pronunciations?
@@sergeyarkhipov781 interesting, I am finlandsswedish and we definitely have a finnish accent but lots of our phonetics seem to be quite a lot archaic yes!
@@Vainaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Interesting! To me, it seems that more phonetic pronunciation, more closely reflecting the spelling os more like old swedish. Like "sk" in ON was pronounced "s" and "k". Older swedish (and I think Finland swedish?) Is like english "sh", and modern swedish, to me sounds like "fh".
As a greek who knows ancient greeek and latin there are striking similarities between proto norse ,latin and greek ,especialy in declension
Great video, however I wouldn't say that the voiced and voiceless th are allophones in English. For example, either and ether differ only in the voicing of their th's. I guess the failure of many English speakers to recognize them as different morphemes is mkstly due to the defective orthography
Also "sooth" and "soothe". /ð/ at the start of a word is found almost exclusively in cmavo, but there's a square dance term "thar" which is pronounced /ðaɹ/.
And the vowels are ī and ē sounds, but I know you were making a different point))
A better example would be /l/ and /ɫ/, the light "L" versus the dark "L". We really don't differentiate those sounds. I think the only reason we even have a difference is for words like *follow*, i.e. double "l" consonants; having both the light L and the dark L allows us to pronounce the "ll" with only two moments of the tongue rather than three.
I've noticed that ancient languages have a lot of long words. You pointed that out with proto-Norse. What did that mean? Did people really talk like that, or did you generally say less because your vocabulary was that much longer and unwieldy?
By Proto-Norse do you mean Proto-Germanic?
A later stage in north germanic. By this time, it had already doverged somewhat from proto-germanic.
Døyr fe, døyre frenda(r), døyr sjølv da same, eg veit ein so aldri døyr, domar om dei daude kvanein. Is the old way of saying this in my dialect.
I got very confused with all the complications of language, im more familisr with just learning the language, not its many complications
That's harder to do with historical languages.
10:59 is it possible that the first person pronoun could be dropped in this writer's speech? This seems to be a thing that sometimes happens in languages that already mark the subject in the verb itself. My native language is Finnish and you can definitely drop the first person and the second person pronouns if you want in Finnish. It's not common in contemporary speech but it happens.
It interests me how Swedish often have two words in one word and at the same time for ex Polish only have one word, perhaps there has been very sophisticated filosofi as we say in Swedish in Germanic language, there is also an Ölvdalisk (language) which used runic scripture the longest here in Sweden but that language is very different from normal Swedish and same with Gothic. What I can tell you is that Danish seem to very jumpy and forget emotions and become like French. I wonder where the true philosophy in germanic language originated from. There seem to be som emotional strenght in German language, im not so sure about Danish but I like the jumpiness of it, Swedish language tend to prolonge the sentences and not use that much of emotional playfulness, but I think Polish people have great skills in emotional speach and they have much more z in their words but they are judged as slavic, altough the pope came ofcourse and changed the language in 12th century, very drastically I can say
Soooo basically language changes due to slang wording?? That's what im getting from hearing the whole video.
18:15 We might disagree on who or what Odin was, but I think you have demonstrated someone of that name around the beginning of Yngling dynasty could have penned the original version of Havamal.
To me, this is also relevant for an argument about Moses - some say he could not have written the Torah, since Hebrew as now known didn't exist in his time. Well, what if the Torah was linguistically updated a bit like "daujith fehu" to "deyr fé" (we know the orthography of Hebrew has been updated, since vowels were marked very differently earlier on)?
Back to Havamal ... I would consider Snorre's chronology more reliable than Saxo's, so, I'd put the Yngling clear non-god Fjölner (modern Swedish spelling) visiting Frode of Denmark around the time of Augustus ... I think you demonstrated at least stanza 77 could be from back then.
@@mawetilumogdikilumhahom Obviously, the Samaritan Torah is so.
I am pondering a case for Proto-Sinaitic, except I don't have the expertise required to flesh it out.
Point in case - a text can be transmitted while getting the necessary linguistic updates to pass from one language to another.
@@mawetilumogdikilumhahom You are welcome, I like revisiting old debates!
Because there are only 16 characters in the Elder Futhark?
Leave? Now?
That’s fair ….
Is it really standard to talk of voiced and unvoiced th as allophones in English? Thy and thigh is an obvious minimal pair. There's also thou (pronoun) vs thou (short for 'thousandth'). Or sooth/soothe, teeth/teethe (very common).
Proto-norse seems to come from a distant, mystical past.
I love how the Old Norse fé comes from the proto-Norse fehu, which is one Grimm's law away from the Latin pecu, cattle.
It literally does come out of the distant mythic past dude
the Swedish metal group Wulkanaz actually used to write their lyrics in Proto-Norse until their third album or so I think, their lyrics there are really weird and probably incomprehensible to most people who aren't academic linguists, then they switched to just singing in modern Swedish instead
Any songs in proto norse still up on UA-cam or anywhere
Herregud... you can speak not just Old Norse but Proto-Norse off the top of your head?!?!?!
Why do we still insist on calling it OLD Norse when it isn't obviously being contrasted with a Modern Norse?
Aren’t humans fascinating?
Modern continental Scandinavian verbs... we’re just going to use the pronouns. Definitely confusing if it ever becomes pro-drop.
Point on an error - Stens only if you talk about someone that has Sten as name else it is stenens.
That's what I thought too
In that example, it seems he's only using indefinite forms of "sten". "en stens" rather than "stenens". e.g. "en stens densitet".
@@august_astrom Good point.
Dont think we have an indefinate Word for Stones in norwegian atleast .if there was a man named sten or stein we would say Thats steins wallet. however if we spoke about an indefinate amount of Stones we would say steinene.
We would also say steinens densitet i guess that seperates swedish and norwegian.or en Stein sin densitet.
As a greek who knows ancient greeek and latin there are striking similarities between proto norse ,latin and greek ,especialy in declension